


The wrong kind of infamy

by transarchivist



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy
Genre: Depression, Discussion of Abortion, Dubious Consent, Dysphoria, Eventual Baby, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Medical Assault, Pregnancy complications, Self-Harm, Sexual Assault, Slow Build, Suicidal Thoughts, Trans Character, Transphobia, Transphobia in a Medical Context, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-10
Updated: 2017-11-28
Packaged: 2018-03-17 06:58:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 17
Words: 54,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3519716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transarchivist/pseuds/transarchivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Patrick is trans, stealth, and happy about it.</p><p>Unfortunately, being a trans guy in 2006 is not an experience that is usually improved by an unplanned pregnancy by a man who wants nothing more to do with you, especially when you just so happen to be half-way famous already.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously: Fictional, not libel, please don't sue me etc.

The worst part of testosterone was the thinning hair on top of his head that had started around the time of the second injection, and continued on from there, which is why he had stopped taking it. At some point, eighteen-year-old Patrick had decided he’d rather be “feminine” than bald, and he’d simply quit, without telling his mother or his doctor or anybody else. After three years of begging and pleading to be allowed to take it, coming off after only two seemed a lot like going back on his word.

He’d taken it again for a bit when he was twenty, because his periods had come back, and that was not something he’d ever wanted to deal with again, but after that second dose he’d noticed more hair than usual on his brush, and concluded that those birth control injections that stop your period were the way forward.

And it sucks, because apparently the top surgery he’d had when he turned 18 hadn’t removed all the tissue, or maybe Patrick is just gaining weight. Either way, his moobs are more prominent than he wants them to be.

Over the years, that early dread that someone would find out what he was and tell the world has mostly abated, minus a colossal tantrum that threatened to get them evicted when Joe had made a hole in his bedroom door. In fact, the weight gain provides him with the ideal cover. No one questions him when he’s the only one wearing a shirt during a photo shoot, and even though Dirty has pantsed Joe and Pete multiple times – the single incident with Andy never to be repeated – everyone seems to consider it too cruel to do the same to Patrick. He gets a free pass from Pete’s 24/7/365 frat initiation lifestyle, and instead of ribbing him for getting with too few girls (“Or guys eh, Patrick? Patrick?”), he finds himself gently coached by most of the band and the people they tour with on the subtle but extremely difficult art of having confidence in himself.

It wasn’t that he never _wanted_ to tell Pete or Joe or Andy. It’s just that he’d been too scared, and now it’s too late. He can’t discreetly cough and mention that it’d slipped his mind to tell them he had a vagina every day for the last five years. How would he even bring that into a conversation? So he hasn’t. And they’re getting too high profile these days. Now people want photos of Pete’s dick and the dirt on his suicide attempt, now they want to watch old recordings of Arma Angelus and early Fall Out Boy shows on YouTube and want photos and autographs and blog posts and there is no way, _no way_ Patrick can have the world know something about him that he’s always viewed as being intensely private.

Patrick’s phone buzzes and he sits up in his bed. It’s Pete, and for a moment he wonders why Pete didn’t just knock on his door before he remembers that they haven’t lived together in more than a year. His mouth tastes unreasonably bitter.

_found a title 4 th nu song_

He waits until it becomes clear that Pete won’t be telling him the name until Patrick gives him enough attention before replying, _What is it?_

 _fame <infamy _his phone buzzes almost the second his text has sent.

And isn’t that the truth?

Pete might be looking for infamy, but Patrick will choose fame any day of the week.

 

 

So Patrick isn’t known for hooking up with fans or waking up surrounded by three women he’d met the night before like Andy, or being a serial monogamist who falls in love with every second woman he encounters like Pete.

Joe has had a couple of girlfriends, making him probably the closest to normal out of all of them.

But Patrick hasn’t always been single either. He likes Mark, really likes him, and it’s his first real, organic relationship, because nobody else knows about its existence, and because Mark isn’t a fan and had no real idea who Patrick was when they first met.

It hadn’t taken long for him to find out, but only because going platinum in three separate countries was too much to not brag about when Patrick had really wanted to impress someone.

Mark was special, in a way that reminded him of Pete but was accompanied by no real musical or literary talent. He looked a lot like Pete too, a little darker, with fewer visible teeth to his smile, but the same sort of tortured genius that had somehow found itself channelled into investment banking instead of some kind of art. A respectable haircut, business clothes, and a rich mommy and daddy who had practically handed their son to Harvard but still prided themselves in calling him a “self-made man”.

By all rights, Patrick should’ve hated him, but he didn’t. He’d never considered himself a hopeless romantic before, that was all Pete, and he’d always been too busy to think about marriage, but he could see it with Mark. Maybe they’d go to Massachusetts and do it quietly, where the media would never find out. It’s only been eight months, so Patrick’s not about to bring it up, but it feels like ages. He divides his life into two periods: the first, without Mark, and the second, with him. It feels like a massive thing to be hiding from his best friends. They’d come, obviously, if Mark and Patrick did get married. So would his parents, although Mark hasn’t met his mom and Patrick isn’t sure he wants him to, but if they do meet he’s pretty sure it’ll all work out.

The doorbell rings, and Patrick sits up again, the world continuing to spin even after he’s righted himself. He grabs himself a hat and reaches the door just as Pete lets himself in with his own copy of the key.

“You got me out of bed for nothing,” Patrick grouches, although he’s actually in a pretty good mood.

“Dude, it’s 2pm and we need to finish off like, a bunch of songs before next week.” Pete pushes past him to head for the kitchen, and the world takes a worrying lurch.

“I feel sick,” He protests, but follows Pete because he knows it’s true. In less than three months’ time, they’ll be in the studio, and they’ve only got two songs ready for recording.

“You felt sick yesterday too,” Pete rummages through his cupboard in search of edible food. “Maybe it’s cos all you ate was Cheetos,” He says pointedly, looking at the mostly empty bowl on the counter.

Patrick shrugs. So he’d felt like Cheetos, and only Cheetos all day yesterday. He’d been feeling ill before then.

Pete eventually moves onto Patrick’s freezer and comes up with a box of frozen pizza that claims to be Chicago style but is definitely lying. “Want one?”

“God no,” Patrick huffs, queasy at the thought. “Not for breakfast.”

“Suit yourself Trickster. You’re looking very freckly today.”

“I’m always freckly,” Patrick slumps back into a chair. “It’s a thing.”

“More so than usual.” Pete grins at him, but it looks a little forced.

They sit in Patrick’s kitchen while Pete’s food heats and try to talk as though they’ve been seeing each other every day, when in reality Patrick has been spending more and more time with Mark and since they finished touring, less and less with the band. The smell of pizza cooking does nothing for the sickly feeling in Patrick’s stomach.

Pete launches into an anecdote about Joe from the week before, and that just makes Patrick feel worse, because he could’ve been there if he’d wanted to. Eventually, Pete seems to pick up on his change in mood. “What’s up Patrick?”

Patrick shrugs, but he can already feel that it’s about to happen. He needs to say something. The transgender thing, yeah, he can ignore that, because he doesn’t see it as central to himself. The I-like-men thing, maybe. But the boyfriend-think-I’m-in-love-with-him, been-together-eight-months thing, that can’t slide. It’s too important to him, and Pete and Joe and Andy are important to him too, and they should know.

“Pete,” He swallows, feeling anxious and queasy. But he’s made up his mind to do it, and it’s _Pete_ , so he opens his mouth to continue. Unfortunately, the queasy feeling isn’t only about Mark, because his mouth is full of sick, and instead of having a heart to heart with Pete, he leans away from the table just in time to avoid throwing up on him.

“Shit, Patrick, have you been drinking?” Pete asks.

“No!” Patrick spits through a mouthful of vomit that tastes very slightly of Cheetos. It’s not actually true. He’d been feeling ill yesterday morning, but by 8pm he’d been feeling well enough to join Mark at the kind of bar he could now afford but that his brain refused to consider somewhere he was genuinely allowed to be. He’d only had two drinks though, and it irritates him that Pete would think that Patrick has changed so much that he’d spend all night out drinking and wasn’t just ill. This is just some low-level nausea bug he’s had coming on for the last couple of weeks.

“Try and get it in the sink,” Pete says belatedly. The sink is full of dishes and Patrick has already been sick on the floor. “I’ll get a mop.”

“Don’t,” Patrick waves his hand. He spits again, figuring it’s too late to save the tile. “It’s probably a stomach bug, you don’t wanna get sick. I’ll do it.”

“Okay,” Pete says, and it stings a little even though it wasn’t meant to, because just a few months ago they’d been closer, close enough that Patrick’s had been the shoulder Pete cried on when he was dumped by yet another girlfriend, close enough that Pete had persuaded their bus driver to go eleven miles out of their way to a pharmacy when Patrick had said he felt a cold coming on. “Should we… Pick this up tomorrow? Or next week, whenever you’re feeling better?”

“Yeah, yeah sorry,” Patrick wipes his mouth on a paper towel. “I’ll call you when I’m feeling okay.”

Pete stands and leaves, and after a minute, Patrick hauls himself up to find the mop bucket.

Strangely, by the time he’s done, he feels a lot better. His nose picks up the smell of food, and he recovers Pete’s abandoned pizza from the oven, singed but still acceptable. Eating it without Pete seems wrong, but he chooses not to dwell on it. He texts Mark instead.

_You free this afternoon?_

 

 

Patrick spends the better part of a week hauled up in bed, although he’s fine at night and during the evenings. This isn’t particularly unusual, since morning is his least favourite thing about the day anyway. If he can, he tries not to be awake between the hours of four and noon even when he isn’t sick.

Mark isn’t around much, which isn’t unusual either, and Patrick doesn’t talk to his band very often because he’s still trying to figure out what to tell them and how. He reworks the lyrics for Fame < Infamy a few times, until they fit better with the rhythm he’s using, and sends them back to Pete for approval. The song bounces between them half a dozen times, then to Joe and then to Andy, and miraculously they all seem to have gotten through the composition of an entire song with no arguments and less than an hour of face-to-face contact. Somehow, it feels more like a betrayal than a step up in efficiency.

He still feels crappy the next week too, but it isn’t as bad, in fact, he seems to be getting better, and he doesn’t want to go to the doctor. He’s aware that he’s gained weight again, and the thought of being told to stand on the scales and face his doctor doesn’t fill him with joy.

The next Monday, he spends the morning feeling nauseous but makes it over to Pete’s for practice and inexplicably manages to be early.

Pete opens the door with a “How’re you feeling, Stumpkin pie?” And leads him down to the basement. It’s kind of comforting, being in Pete’s parents’ basement again, where they’d spent so many of their early days practicing.

“I’m alright. Still kinda groggy but I think I’m getting better.”

Pete grins at him as he turns on the light and their old practice space comes flickering into view. “You look good. Great actually.”

“Really?” Patrick can’t help but sound surprised. He’s gained 20lb in the last year and he might not have thrown up this morning, but it was the first time in a while. He’d made the mistake of reading the comments beneath one of their videos and someone had been kind enough to christen him “Fatrick Plump.”

Pete gives him a long-suffering look, as though Patrick is putting himself down for no reason. “Really. Come on, let’s get things set up. I wanna hear what Andy’s done with the drums on that track.”

The nostalgia of setting up the room with Pete like they haven’t done for so long seems to gently rekindle Patrick’s feelings for the band, and by the time Andy arrives, he’s feeling pretty good about them and their music. He thinks about telling the two of them about Mark while they wait for Joe, but every time Pete speaks, Andy plays increasingly loud paradiddles over him and the three of them crack up laughing.

By the time they’re done, he can hear Joe chattering to Pete’s mom upstairs, and it’s time to play.

 

 

“Hi mom,” Patrick tries to sound pleased when he answers the phone, but it’s 10am and he can only assume she wouldn’t have called him in the morning if she wanted him to be happy about it. “What is it?”

“Charming. I just wanted to talk to my son, who’s been in town for four months now and has only visited twice!”

“Fine, I’ll come see you sometime later this week.” Patrick rolls over and tries to pretend he isn’t awake.

“For goodness sake Patrick, it’s 10 O’ clock! You should be up and doing things.” His mother should sound resigned but unfortunately she just sounds exasperated.

“I’m _sick_.” He might as well use it while he can. “And ten isn’t that late.”

“Well… What kind of sick?” His mom asks suspiciously.

“Just sick. Stomach sick. It seems to be okay, it’s mainly when I wake up that it’s bad, it’ll be fine later.”

“Only when you wake up?” Patricia’s concern makes Patrick crack an eyelid. “As in, only in the morning?”

“Mom, you know I never even see mornings unless I absolutely have to.”

“Hmm, I know that darling. I just…” Patrick can hear her voice change from _worried_ to _don’t bite my head off for saying it._ “You’re not _like_ other boys Patrick. You know that.”

“Urgh,” Patrick can’t help but say it aloud. “Yes mom I know.”

“Remember what the doctor said when we took you to get those hormones Patrick,” She tells him. He remembers every last minute of those horrible appointments. “There’s still a slight possibility that you could... _conceive_ after you start taking them.”

“I’m not pregnant _mom_ ,” Patrick huffs. “And I’m on birth control!”

“Oh. Well, if you’re sure…” She doesn’t sound sure.

“Yes, I am, thanks for your concern but you don’t need to worry. I’m going back to bed, night, mom!” He presses the red button on his phone just as his mother says something about gastic flu.

Pregnant. What a mess that would be.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for transphobic language/attitudes, cancer mention

Denial is a strong force, and it carries Patrick through to mid-afternoon on Friday, when he leaves a fairly unproductive attempt at band practice early to go and get ready for dinner with Mark. He stops off at the pharmacy to find some anti-nausea pills, not wanting to chance it even if he is feeling fine at the moment, and some asshole clerk has thoughtfully lined them up right next to several brands of pregnancy tests.

There’s an offer on, a two pack of tests for half price. He grabs one and then tries to hide it behind the sickness pills and more antacids than he thinks he’ll ever need. His face burns so bright he's sure anyone watching him will think he's doing something suspect anyway.

The pharmacist scans his purchase and smiles. “Are you and your girlfriend trying to conceive or is this..?”

When Patrick stares at her, she coughs, embarrassed.

“Uh,” Patrick feels his face turn hotter, if it were possible. “It’s a surprise,” He says at last, because it’s all he can think of. Then he gathers up his things, jams them into the pocket on the side of his guitar case, and leaves as quickly as possible.

 

Even while he’s peeing on the stick, it feels like he’s indulging his mom’s paranoia. He can’t be pregnant. He gets his injection regularly. He’s been on testosterone before, and was assured at the time that it might make him unable to conceive _forever_ , and he and Mark don’t have that kind of sex all that often. He's already decided he's not pregnant anyway; it's been months since they had sex like that, and his belly isn't that big. He'd had a minor panic when feeling himself up, because it felt like maybe there was something in there, but then he'd remembered that he was always full of organs and that he hardly spent enough time palpitating his uterus at the best of times to have any kind of comparison now.

It’s harder than he’d imagined, and he pees on his hand as well as the stick and over the toilet seat besides. “Darn!” Patrick mutters before he realises he’s alone in the bathroom and can swear all he likes. Then he cusses his mother out for her neurotic fears while he clears up the mess he’s made and turns back to the stick.

Two lines. He picks up the box. No line: Invalid. One Line: Not Pregnant. Two lines: Pregnant. He picks the stick back up and waves it around, flinging pee onto the bathroom mirror and failing to erase the second line. Then he sits down on the toilet and stares at it for several minutes.

The second line is smaller than the first. It might be a false positive.

He drinks two glasses of water, and half of a third and then waits anxiously in the bathroom until he can force out enough urine to take the other test.

Positive. Two false positives is probably a thing. It might be the batch.

Or he might have a brain tumour. He’s seen a lot of bad medical dramas in his time.

Somehow, that last option is the most comforting, and he dials the number to his doctor with shaking hands instead of running back out to the chemist for another test.

“Hello? I need to speak to Dr Muller?” His voice cracks a little.

The receptionist tries to probe for more information, but eventually he agrees to pass Patrick on, and the phone clicks as his doctor picks up.

“Hello? How may I help you?”

A brain tumour is a long shot. But telling someone he’s pregnant is not on Patrick’s list of things to do today, so it’s the shot he takes. “I-I think I might have cancer.”

 

 

Instead of directing Patrick to the nearest oncology ward, his doctor schedules him for an emergency appointment at the surgery for the end of the day, which is pretty much upon them, and Patrick walks down the street to the office with a strong suspicion that his otherwise comfortable world is about to end.

By the time he’s in the waiting room, he feels so ill that the receptionist takes in his appearance with alarm and calls a doctor through who is not Patrick’s doctor.

She’s a youngish woman named Dr Clyde and she asks Patrick a series of questions, to which he only replies that he wants to see Dr Muller. He can’t explain to this woman he’s never met that he’s just taken a pregnancy test and found himself positive when he should’ve been shaping up his sideburns for his date with his gay boyfriend this evening.

Eventually Dr Muller’s last patient leaves, and he ushers Patrick into his office.

Before Patrick can speak, Dr Muller, Patrick’s family doctor since he was five years old, now entering a pudgy middle age, smiles tightly and says, “Patrick… I hate to be the one to point this out, but you yourself decided to take a pregnancy test. That must mean you thought it was possible.”

“Yes, but –"

"What made you take the test?" Dr Muller interrupts. 

"I've been sick, in the mornings, my mom thought that maybe, but I _can't_..."

“I know you take testosterone and you get the injection, but even with perfect use there’s a small chance of pregnancy," Dr Muller sighs. "I've not heard of anyone getting pregnant on both before, but you are the only transsexual patient I've ever had, so..."

“It could be a brain tumour,” Patrick says stubbornly, holding out on his non-existent, TV-informed medical degree. He'd assumed that the testosterone he was meant to be taking would've made Dr Muller think twice about him being pregnant, but since that's not happening he's happy to continue down the denial route by himself if necessary.

Dr Muller’s smile tightens even further until it’s just tense lips pulled across teeth. “I’m afraid it’s very unlikely, and even if it were a brain tumour, that would be much harder to deal with than an unwanted pregnancy. I can do a scan to check.”

“A brain scan?” Patrick says after a pause. His head fills with MRIs and unknown machines.

“An ultrasound. You no longer have periods since you've been on hormones?”

Patrick shakes his head. He knows this is only true because the progesterone in the birth control injection is a hormone, but he can't bring himself to tell Dr Muller he's stopped taking T and might be pregnant both in the same evening.

“When did you last have vaginal sex?”

Patrick blinks up at his doctor. He feels anxious, like that kind of sex was off-limits to someone like him and he’s been caught in the act. “Uh… I don’t know. A while ago.”

“More than six months?”

Patrick shakes his head. Tears prick behind his eyes, and he blinks them away. Even though he’s being told he doesn’t have an aggressive brain tumour, it's hard to feel like he isn't trading it in for an even worse sentence. “Not that long. Two, three. Maybe four, I don’t know.”

“Okay, well, if you’ll lie on the bed, I’ll get the ultrasound machine. Is that okay?” Doctor Muller waits for Patrick to nod, even though it isn’t, and turns away to rummage in a cupboard on the other side of the office. “Sorry, I don’t use this very often. Most of my patients have these done at the hospital, but I think… In your case… It’s better that I do it, rather than a doctor who doesn’t know your situation.”

Patrick carries on nodding even when Dr Muller isn’t facing him, and tries unsuccessfully to climb onto the bed. It’s higher than a normal one, and his limbs seem to have turned to rubber. Eventually Dr Muller places what looks like a small, ugly, hospital-coloured laptop onto the desk and turns back to lower the bed enough for Patrick to stumble onto it. He lifts up his shirt, and then puts it down again, because he hasn’t been told to.

Dr Muller smiles again. “You’ll be fine, Patrick,” He says, and lifts Patrick's shirt. He picks up the wand for the machine and squirts something cold out onto Patrick’s belly.

Patrick doesn’t dare look down; instead, he screws up his eyes and grips the frame of the bed, as though bracing himself for physical pain. It takes a few minutes of something nudging at his abdomen, during which he begins to wonder if he really might have a brain tumour. Or an ectopic pregnancy. Or maybe something is wrong with his uterus and he’ll have to have it removed.

Dr Muller clears his throat. “Well… You don’t have a brain tumour.”

Patrick groans and turns his face to the wall for a minute. A few tears he hadn't been expecting run out onto the paper-covered padding propping up his head before he can blink his eyes back to obedience.

“Do you want to see it?” Patrick can hear Dr Muller turning the screen towards him.

“I don’t know,” He says, at the same moment he lifts his head.

He feels the breath catch in his chest and for several seconds he can’t breathe at all. Then he lets out a strangled moan and collapses backwards onto the bed.

“How pregnant am I?”

He’d been expecting something tiny, a weirdly shaped lump like the chick embryos they’d looked at in advanced biology, not something that looked like an actual baby. Even though he'd known the moment Dr Muller asked if he wanted to see it that he really was pregnant, he hadn't understood just how pregnant he could be.

“It’s not as big as it looks on the screen,” Dr Muller sounds plaintive but Patrick can’t bring himself to look at him. His knuckles crack against the bed frame. He's pretty sure that the screen is too small to possibly portray anything as larger than life. It's barely six inches across. “It’s a little over 3 inches long. I think you’re about 13 weeks, perhaps fourteen weeks pregnant. Because you didn’t have a period, it’s hard to say.”

There’s an uncomfortable pause that stretches between them, until Dr Muller takes the wand away and turns off the scanner. “I’m afraid this machine can't take pictures, you’d need to go to the hospital for that.”

Patrick doesn’t respond. He just lies there, trying to control his breathing, while Dr Muller wipes off his stomach and hands him a box of Kleenex. For some reason this makes Patrick feel worse, more disgusted. He doubts Dr Muller would have done that to a man - a real man, because what the hell was Patrick now? Years of forcing himself to ignore the nagging feeling that he would never be what he wanted have broken down, and now Patrick can tell, he absolutely  _knows_ that everyone, Dr Muller included, sees him as an ugly woman in denial. 

“Do you want to discuss your options?”

Patrick shakes his head. “No, not right now, I can’t right now,” He’s aware that although he's irritable, he’s almost pleading. "I need to go somewhere, I've got to speak to my boyfriend."

“I understand. You have the number for the surgery, make an appointment for some time next week. Or phone.”

Patrick nods. He scrubs his face dry and pulls his shirt down, and then he stumbles home to lock himself in his bathroom, where he retches for the twentieth time in as many days, only this time it isn’t from morning sickness.

 

 

Patrick meets Mark at the restaurant, almost half an hour late, and immediately knows he won’t be able to stick it out through dinner.

“Can we go home please?” Is the first thing he says.

The first thing Mark says is, “Jesus Patrick, you look terrible!” And it goes downhill from there.

Mark pays for his drink and drives them back to his own apartment, because he’s 29 and he has his own car and can do things like that. During the journey, Patrick gets more and more anxious, until he’s crying silently in the passenger seat.

“Fuck, Patrick, did something happen?” Mark asks, again, and Patrick shakes his head, again.

On the elevator to Mark’s floor, Patrick buries his face in the man’s shirt and sobs so hard that he chokes and the woman who gets in behind them gets straight back out again, looking disgruntled.

“Patrick, what’s happened? What’s going on?” Mark murmurs as he hauls Patrick into his apartment from the corridor. He sounds uncomfortable, and Patrick realises that however insecure he himself may be, it’s usually him comforting Mark and focusing on Mark’s drama, like it is with him and Pete.

Patrick tugs him towards the couch and piles himself up against his chest, leaning close to his lover’s ear. _I’m pregnant_. His lips form the words but no sound comes out apart from wet, choked gasp.

“Hmm?” Mark asks, pushing Patrick away so that he can see his face.

The pause seems to go on forever, until Patrick is no longer certain he can speak at all. His throat and mouth work mechanically, forcing the words out. “I’m pregnant.”

For a moment, Mark looks at him as though he's lost the ability to comprehend English.

“What?” He laughs in disbelief, his face a parody of anger.

“I’m pregnant,” Patrick says again.

Mark's face goes very pale, and suddenly breaks out in angry red splotches. “I thought you were on birth control. You said you had injections, you said-“

“Well they didn’t work!” Patrick snaps, trying to tug himself away.

“Hey, hey!” Mark braces and arm across his back, pulling him in. “Patrick, it’s okay. I’ll take you to the clinic on Monday, okay? I have money, it'll be fine, I'll pay for you to get rid of it -”

“What? I don’t even know what I want to do yet.” Patrick bites back, even though he does know - but how dare Mark just _assume_ he'd get an abortian? He puts an arm against Mark's chest and pushes back hard but it doesn’t seem to move Mark at all.

“Well, you _are_ getting rid of it,” Mark says, as though the matter is obvious, settled.

“I don’t know. Probably.”

“There is no "probably", Patrick,” Mark grabs his shoulders in each hand and forces Patrick to look at him. “You can’t keep it. You’ve spent too long trying to convince everyone you’re a man. Men don’t have babies Patrick.”

“Well I can!” Patrick thumps him in the chest and Mark lets go, Patrick sliding to his ass on the floor with a bump that jars his tailbone.

“Patrick, any kid you have will get the shit kicked out of it! Kids are cruel Patrick, you can’t just go to school with a man for a mother!” Mark throws his arms up and then rakes his fingers through his own hair.

Patrick ignores the pain shooting up his spine and forces himself to his feet. “Other kids being assholes aren’t my fault, Mark.”

“No but they would be your _problem_! Look, I’m not having a kid with a- a- with _you_ , Patrick. It’s not happening.” Mark stands at the same time Patrick does, and unlike Pete he towers over Patrick by almost a foot.

Patrick steps back. “It’s my choice whether I get rid of it or not!”

“Your goddamn choice? Where’s my choice? Don’t I get a say in it? I'm not ready! This is not how I want to raise my kids, Patrick! The baby doesn’t get a choice, you think anyone would choose _you_ for a parent?!” Patrick can’t tell if it’s the shouting or a side-effect of his current human-parasite infestation, or if it’s something to do with Mark’s body language, but he’s suddenly filled with a fear that overrides any pride he might otherwise have.

He’s tripping back towards the door before Mark can say another word, struggling to open the lock and then he’s yanking the door open.

“For fuck’s sake Patrick, come back here and talk about it!” Mark lowers his voice so he’s barely yelling, trying to sound reasonable. Just like he does in every argument.

“No, I think I get it,” Patrick steps out through the door so he can slam it behind him it Mark gets any closer. “You think that I’m some kind of pervert!”

“I do not!”

“Yes you do! You think I’m adult for just existing! You think I’m inappropriate for children just because of who I am!” He’s never entirely owned the whole _being transgender_. He always figured he came out too young, that his head was filled with words like _birth defect_ and _disorder_ before it could be filled with the foundations of what others like him called an identity, but right now, the idea that someone is threatening it is making his heart beat a mile a minute.

“You _are_ inappropriate for children Patrick! You'd just confuse the kid, that’s why I’m saying I don’t want –“

“FUCK YOU!” Patrick slams the door and vaults toward the stairs, barely making it down one flight before he hears Mark wrenching it open behind him.

“Patrick, we’re not fucking doing this! Get back here right now damn it!”

Patrick slips out onto the next landing and runs down the corridor to the parallel stairs and then runs down them as fast as he can, heart thundering in his chest. He makes it down to the ground floor and sees Mark emerge on the other side of the lobby, spinning around, searching for him.

He hangs back, panting until Mark leaves through the front doors, still casting around for signs of Patrick. Then he takes out his phone and stares at it. He can’t get into a cab like this, he can’t, and there’s no way he’s getting on a bus.

He calls Pete.

“Hi Patrick!” Pete sounds genuinely pleased to hear from him and a wave of guilt rolls through Patrick. He hardly ever calls Pete just to talk these days. “Trick? Is everything okay?”

Patrick pants for a moment until he finally has enough air to respond. “No. It’s not. Pete, I need you to pick me up.”

“Okay," Pete sounds taken aback, but doesn't ask him why. "Where are you?”

 


	3. The surprisingly long coming out scene

It takes about thirty seconds after he ends the call for Patrick to realise that the right person to have phoned was his mom. He didn't do that though, and now he has to live with the consequences.

Patrick spends half an hour awkwardly hanging around in the lobby of Mark’s apartment waiting for Pete and hoping that the man at the desk won’t notice him. Mark doesn’t come back, and when Pete’s oversized car pulls up across the street, Patrick dashes out just in case he's lingering somewhere nearby.

“Fuck,” Pete says when Patrick opens the door and slides into the passenger seat. “What happened?”

Patrick shakes his head, sinking low in his seat in case Mark comes back. “Can we just get out of here please?”

“Yeah.” Pete pulls out while still staring at Patrick, almost ramming the side of a pink limo. “Dude, what happened?”

“I don’t want to say in the car,” He says. Actually, he doesn’t want to say it anywhere. He has no idea what he’s meant to tell Pete; he can't say anything without also revealing that he’s being lying by omission for the duration of their entire friendship, but he knows he’s going to have to say _something_. He should’ve called his mother, should’ve realised that swallowing his stubborn pride and telling her he was pregnant after all and dealing with it privately would be easier than having to tell Pete _everything_.

They drive in silence for a few minutes until they hit a red light. The pause makes Patrick agitated, and Pete sits up in his seat, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

“Is it drugs, Trick?” Pete looks like he might be sick himself. The short hairs on the back of his neck that he constantly burns himself straightening are all on end and Patrick can see the goose pimples on his arms reflecting the red light. “Because they can be dangerous. The dealers, I mean.”

“What?” Patrick asks Pete’s arm. He can’t stop staring at it, how it goes from red to orange when the lights change.

“Andy won’t be angry,” Pete continues his nervous chatter as they get moving again. “I mean, he will but you know he cares about you more than all that stuff. There’s rehab, and you’re too high profile to get away from any dealers, but we can pay people off if we have to. Patrick?”

Patrick almost says _okay_ before he catches himself. “Pete, I’m not on drugs.”

“Is it the law?” Pete asks him, staring at the road like it might try to jump up and kill them.

“No it is _not_ the law!” Patrick snaps at him. The last thing he needs is Pete’s hysteria on top of his own.

Pete nods, and Patrick thinks he must be honouring Patrick’s request to not talk in the car. “…Because if you’re in trouble-“

“For God’s sake Pete!” Patrick can feel a day’s worth of shouting and crying straining his vocal chords. “I’ll tell you when we get home!”

“Your home or mine?” Pete takes both hands off the steering wheel to wipe them on his jeans, meeting Patrick’s gaze in the mirror for so long that he almost misses the next light.

“Mine. Your parent’s aren’t invited to this conversation.” Patrick turns to look out his window, trying to collect himself and what he wants to say, but he can’t. He can’t even think about it without panic clutching at his chest and smothering him until he can barely breathe. He goes through several cycles of almost-panic attacks and getting distracted before Pete parks badly in front of Patrick’s apartment.

Patrick gets out before Pete can say anything, but doesn’t try to stop Pete following him up the stairs and in through his front door. His legs feel like jelly underneath him.

He drags himself through to the kitchen without turning back and is about to pop the tab on a beer before he remembers that he shouldn’t drink. He puts it back.

“What’s wrong?” Pete asks from behind him.

“Nothing, Pete. Do you want a drink?” The beer he’s still holding is room temperature. Patrick rarely drinks.

“No. I want you to tell me what’s going on.” Pete sounds serious, which is unusual. Patrick can’t bring himself to look round.

“It’s complicated,” Patrick puts the can back where he found it.

There’s a weight on Patrick’s shoulder, and he does his best not to let Pete feel him shudder. He almost wants to knock Pete's hand away. He grips his own elbows instead and leans forward onto the counter. He feels odd about letting it press against his belly now, knowing there’s something growing in there.

“You know you can tell me anything, Patrick?” Pete promises, not quite sarcastic, and squeezes the place where Patrick’s shoulder joins his neck.

“But I didn’t," Patrick tells the counter glumly.

“Didn’t what?”

“I didn’t tell you. And now…” Patrick shrugs and Pete tugs him back by the shoulder until his back bumps into Pete's chest. He was probably supposed to turn around. It's the closest they’ve come to a hug offstage since Pete recovered from his breakdown, and even though his _problem_  is only three inches long, Patrick feels off-balance.

Pete locks his arm across Patrick’s chest, skin still chilled from the car’s air conditioning. “|Come on, just tell me. You’ll only have to do it once, then it’s done. Are you sick?”

“Not… really.” Patrick adjusts his hat, conscious that Pete can see the back of his head.

Pete exhales next to Patrick’s ear, a warm gust of air. “Is it your voice? Is it the band?”

“No. Pete, stop suggesting things, you aren't going to guess it.”

“All you have to do is _tell me_. Am I not your bestest friend?”

Patrick smiles despite himself and pulls out of Pete’s grip. “I dunno, you might have to compete with Joe on that one. It’s… Really complicated.”

He turns to face Pete who takes half a step back. “Your budding romance with Joe, or the reason you called me halfway through dinner with my parents to come rescue you from some uptown apartment block?”

Patrick hugs his belly. He already can’t tell if this is something he does anyway or if it’s because… “The second one.”

“Just say it. A problem shared is a problem halved, and I’m already here, so…” Pete smiles and drags a chair back from the kitchen table, sitting down on it pointedly, but the resolution in his voice doesn’t stop him from bouncing his knee up and down, tapping an anxious rhythm on the floor.

“You’re gonna be pissed.”

“Jesus, Patrick! I’m gonna be pissed if you set this whole conversation with me and then refuse to actually have it, so you might as well just start talking! What is this, some kind of slow fucking torture?” Pete huffs but keeps his voice down.

“Sorry…” Patrick waits for Pete to forgive him to delay the inevitable, but Pete just sits in his kitchen chair and watches at him. “Fine. Have you... Do you know what transgender is?”

Pete blinks at him. “No?”

“It’s… I…” Patrick stares around his kitchen as though it might supply them with a handy glossary, but it fails to deliver.

“Is it like a… hermaphrodite?” Pete asks, when the conversation doesn’t pick back up.

“Uh… No, that’s intersex. You’re thinking of something different.” Patrick’s throat clicks and he reaches for a diet coke. He passes the warm beer over to Pete and hears him pop the tab. 

Pete takes a gulp and grimaces. “Still gonna need you to tell me what it means, then.”

“How about _transsexual_?”

Some sort of realisation dawns on Pete’s face. Patrick’s stomach drops as his eyes widen and his eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “You… Want to have a sex change? Like, to be a woman?”

He can’t help but laugh at that one. “Oh God no. I can’t imagine what my mom would say after she spent all those thousands of dollars on surgery and hormones so I could transition to be a man.”

Pete doesn’t laugh.

Neither of them says anything. Patrick opens his diet coke and drinks half of it, not daring to look at Pete at all. He wonders if you’re allowed to drink coke if you’re pregnant, and then remembers that you only need to worry about the baby if you intend to stay that way, so he keeps on drinking.

“I… Don’t understand,” Pete says. “What are you saying? I’m confused.”

“People usually are.” Patrick belches. The coke was too carbonated. He waves it in Pete’s general direction, but Pete doesn’t even lean out the way like he normally would. “You thought I wanted to be a woman, but it’s the other way around. I started taking testosterone when I was sixteen, and when I was eighteen, I had top su- I had a mastectomy. When I told you guys I had that holiday, I was really in Florida.”

“I never noticed you having boobs before then…” Pete’s voice is quiet, and the way he sounds like he’s reasoning against a loss is irritating, but Patrick tries to be kind.

“You can hide pretty much anything if you've got enough spandex. I wore a thing called a binder. It flattened them, but it also made it hard to breathe, so when we started playing for real, I persuaded my parents I had to get it done.” The ingredients list on the diet coke is very interesting, so Patrick reads it twice.

“What about?” Pete asks, and Patrick has to look up to see what he’s talking about. Pete waves a hand that encompasses most of the middle of Patrick. “The whole dick thing? When did you get that… Added.”

“The same time as my parents got the patio.” All of Patrick’s jokes seem to be wasted this evening. “I don’t have a dick. Just all the original plumbing. Actually, that’s kind of the problem…”

“You’re sad because you don’t have a dick? Don’t they have like, a reverse sex change surgery for that? Was that apartment where you met the surgeon? Is it like a transplant or-”

This is too much for Patrick. He leaves Pete in the kitchen and he takes his soda with him, slamming his bedroom door as loudly as he can without getting on the wrong side of his neighbours.

He’d been stupid to think he could spring all of this on Pete in one day and still get what he needed from him. He curls up on his bed, and then straightens out again and shifts around, trying to find a position that doesn’t remind him of his treacherous body and its tiny human parasite.

Pete knows from when they lived together that entering Patrick’s room without permission can only bring his wrath down harder, so he settles for pleading from the other side of the door. “Patrick, I’m sorry! Did I say something? Come on Patrick, I didn’t mean to upset you. You know I’d give you mine if I could…”

“What the hell Pete?” He can’t help but shout back. He’s not angry at Pete really. Just angry that there’s no one around who understands enough to be sympathetic to Patrick’s plight as unwilling host. “When are you gonna grow up and learn that not everyone wants your dick?”

“Patrick! You didn’t finish explaining! I don’t understand and you can’t just not say what the problem is and expect it to just _be obvious_. You won’t even give me a chance!” There’s a thump on the door and Patrick suspects it was caused by an impact with Pete’s skull. “Please?”

Patrick groans and pulls his pillow over his head. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

“…Fine.” Pete sounds anything but. Patrick can hear the temporary resignation in his voice which usually signals his distaste for some change Patrick has made to his lyrics which he can’t be bothered to argue over. They usually finish the row sooner or later. Patrick just wants him to leave so he can call his mom and cry at her instead.

“Just… Just go home and I’ll see you on Monday. Please.”

“Okay…” Pete sighs dejectedly and Patrick hears him walking away down the hall.

He sags into his bed, exhausted.

He’s debating getting into his pyjamas when the door opens and Pete’s head pops through. “Patrick?”

“What?!”

Pete opens the door further and holds his arm out. “I went to take a leak before I leave, and I found this in your bathroom…”

If anything, the two red lines are clearer now. Patrick sniffles into the room, once.

“Whose is it?”

“Mine, obviously.”

Pete steps into the bedroom and Patrick doesn’t turf him out. He just rolls away to face the wall and rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms.

“I meant who’s the… _Other_ father.”

Patrick can only groan at the mention of Mark. His eyes feel wet and he scrubs at them.

“Trick?” Pete grabs him gently by the shoulder and tries to roll him onto his back. “Did someone hurt you?”

“ _No._ ” He refuses to budge, jerking his shoulder out of Pete's hand. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Hey-“

“It’s too much, Pete. Please, just let me…”

“Fine.”

After that, Pete says nothing and neither does Patrick. He lies there thinking, and now the conversation is over his mind drifts back to the argument with Mark.

He doesn’t want to talk about him to Pete, not least because he’d hidden his boyfriend of eight months from his best friend, but also because he still doesn’t know where they stand. He doesn’t want to rant about him to Pete if he’s going to get with Mark again in three days’ time and have to convince him not to hate the man. He’d invested so much in that relationship and he loves Mark so hard that he refuses to believe it’s _over_. His chest seizes when he imagines never being able to see him again, never being able to hug him or stay up till four watching the kind of shitty art films that none of the band will tolerate and cooking with red wine in a slow-cooker instead of in a toaster on a bus.

Mark wasn’t the first guy he’d ever slept with, but he was the first in a long time, the first since he’d become recognisably famous, and the first person he’d both slept with _and_ dated. And sure, he’d been out with a few people since the outset of Fall Out Boy, but he liked to take things slow and the relationship usually fell apart a few months in when he _still_ hadn’t come out and didn’t dare let them touch him.

It turned out that it was much easier to come out to someone who he didn’t already know, and Mark had just been a virtual stranger. Someone who approached him at a private party at which Patrick was just another guest who just wanted to fuck and who didn’t mind what Patrick had going on between his legs so long as he got to play with it too, and who’d asked for Patrick’s number as he was leaving for work in the morning.

It was regular, normal, devoid of fame and the careful avoidance of numerous off-limits topics that Patrick went through with everyone else. And the sex had been great. Mark made Patrick feel special and perfectly ordinary at the same time, and that was kind of the point.

But Patrick isn’t perfectly ordinary. And Mark had made it very clear what he felt about that, deep down. It’s been a long time since someone knew enough about Patrick to make him feel ashamed of himself. His mom has always said he’s great with kids. But maybe Mark is right and having someone like Patrick for a parent would just fuck a child up.

He’s not sure if children had ever really been part of the plan, but he guesses they sort of were. Somehow, alongside a few platinum albums and crowds of screaming stars, the version of the rock’n’roll lifestyle Patrick subscribed to culminated in interviews about his wife and children and what it was like to tour without them. He’s not sure why the fantasy in his head involves a wife and not a man, or why he imagines she isn’t on tour with them in a band of her own, but the image has definitely been there, lingering at the back of his mind from a hundred televised interviews of other bands as they aged out of the youth phase.

Patrick finally takes a deep, serrated breath and pushes himself upright, turning to get out of bed and accidentally stepping into Pete’s lap where he’s still sitting cross-legged on Patrick’s floor, watching him.

“Fuck!” Patrick swears, tripping over Pete’s leg but managing to right himself. “I forgot you were there.”

“Uh, well… I am. Obviously,” Pete tries to smile. He still looks slightly ill.

The pause between them manages somehow to feel more pregnant than Patrick. Pete ends it by standing up and grabbing his phone from where it's fallen out of his pocket.

“Sorry,” Is all Patrick can think of to say, because he is. He feels like a total dick.

“Dude,” Pete squeezes his shoulder again. “Don’t be.”

Patrick shuts his mouth to stop himself from apologising for apologising, and Pete seems to take it as a cue to leave.

They both walk towards the front door of Patrick’s apartment; Pete opens it and then stops in the doorway.

“Do you know what you’re going to do about it yet?” He asks, and Patrick is relieved that at least Pete wants to hear what Patrick has to say about it before he shares his own opinion.

“Not really. Probably get rid of it.” Patrick stares at Pete’s hand holding his door open.

Pete nods. “Okay. Are you… How far along?”

“The doctor said thirteen, maybe fourteen weeks.” Three-and-a-half months. How could he not know he was pregnant for three-and-a-half months?

Pete sucks in a breath and coughs to conceal it. “Can you get an abortion in the second semester in Illinois?”

“It’s a trimester. And I think so.” Pete’s nails are blunt and bitten to the quick. Patrick can see the callouses reflecting the light in his hallway.

“Do you need… Does someone… Go with you?”

It’s obviously an olive branch and Patrick is dying to take it, but… “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Well, I’m… We should talk more, Patrick. You should talk to me more.” Pete gives him a very fake smile.

Patrick loses focus on Pete’s fingers and meets his gaze for a second. The lines around his mouth and eyes look deep, maybe it’s the lighting. Or maybe not. “I will. G’night.”

“Night, Trick.” Pete closes the door behind him, leaving Patrick alone in his apartment. Just him and the parasite.

Patrick goes back to his room and buries himself under the covers. It’s too late to call his mom now, and there are no missed calls or texts on his phone from Mark.

He’s too exhausted to cry, but he gives it a go anyway. When he gets up a few hours later to pee, his pillow is still damp.

 


	4. Chapter 4

Patrick awakes to the buzz of his phone and the feeling of having rested after too long of desperately needing to. He needs to pee again but his limbs feel heavy and comfortable, so he lets himself drift back to sleep until he hears a second hum and forces himself to look at his phone.

Then he sees the two missed calls from Mark and remembers what happened yesterday and his stomach plummets.

Suddenly instead of lazy and relaxed, he’s fidgeting like someone trapped in bed while their house is on fire, and his heart is pounding so hard he can hear it.

He tries to call Mark back, but his fingers are having none of it and he accidentally selects his mom’s contact. He hastily jabs at the red button and ends the call before she can answer it. It seems to take forever, but eventually the phone is dialling Mark’s cell.

It rings once before Mark picks it up. “Patrick.” His voice is clipped but urgent, flattened by the phone’s speaker.

“H-hey,” Patrick swallows. His mouth is dry and his palms are sweaty, slipping on the back of his phone.

“So. Have you thought about it?” Mark asks, as though what he’d left Patrick with the day before were options to consider, his tone settling somewhere between a business proposal and a choice of holiday destination. Patrick's stomach sinks even lower in disappointment.

“Not really,” Patrick says, and it’s only half a lie. He’s thought about everything a hell of a lot, borrowing mostly from Pete’s particular style of catastrophic thinking, but he hasn’t actually given much time to deciding what he’s going to do.

“Patrick, you’re twenty-two. You’re not married and you’re going on tour next year.”

“Plenty of people have kids this age. Plenty of bands go on tour when one of them has kids,” Patrick sighs. He doesn’t even know why he’s arguing, when he has no intention of keeping the baby. “And loads of people have kids out of wedlock, this isn’t the fifties, Mark. We could _get_ married, if you wanted to. We could move to -”

Mark laughs at him, and Patrick slumps back into his bed, feeling his chest squeeze. He’d been dreaming of it for so long – casually, speculatively at first, and then as the fantasy became more concrete and their relationship had gotten stronger – he’d just assumed it would happen. Mark clearly hasn't assumed anything, beyond Patrick’s suitability as a parent, and for a moment Patrick is too hurt to even be angry.

Mark is angry though. “Patrick. I really like you. Like, a fucking lot. Why are you trying to fuck this up? Why are you sabotaging our relationship?”

“I’m not _sabotaging_ anything,” Patrick sighs sadly. “You’re the one who said it felt better without a condom.”

“Because _it does_! And because I _thought_ you were on fucking birth control!” Patrick has to turn the volume down on his phone. “Is that what this is? You lied about being on it so you could have my fucking kid?”

“What the fuck?” Patrick apparently can scrape together enough anger from somewhere, because he’s shouting again. “Do you even care what I want at all?! You haven’t even asked me what I wanted to do about it!”

“I have asked. I just asked a fucking minute ago, and you just said you _hadn’t even thought about it_.” Mark breathes heavily into the phone, “It’s all I’ve thought about since the second you’ve told me! You can’t just do this on the down-low Patrick! You’re a fucking small-time celebrity, they’ll find out you’re pregnant, they’ll wanna know all about it, they’ll want to know who the father is. I am _not_ sacrificing my reputation – my _career_ because some broody fucking trann-transsexual is trying to have my fucking kid!”

Patrick hangs up the phone, fairly certain that Mark had just barely stopped himself from saying his least favourite word. “Prick! You fucking prick, Mark!”

He throws the phone across the room and it hits his dresser hard. He doesn’t check to see if it survived, just storms from his room and tries to shower as aggressively as possible, letting the water sear his skin for a few seconds before worries about heat stroke have him turning the temperature down.

He doesn’t stop repeating his mantra of _fuck yous_ until he’s covered most of his bathroom in water and left wet, stomping footprints leading back through to his room.

When he picks up his phone there are two texts from Pete, one that says _cn I cum over?_ And another timed several minutes later that reads _on my way._

Patrick considers texting back and asking him not to come, but the second text was send 15 minutes ago and Pete doesn’t live all that far away; eventually, indecision makes the choice for him anyway, because the doorbell sounds while Patrick is still stood in his towel holding his phone. He shoves on yesterday’s boxers which don’t look like they smell too bad, and argyle sweater from his floordrobe and buzzes him inside. Pete peed in his shower every day for eighteen months. He can handle Patrick’s dirty underwear.

“I got here as fast as I could,” Pete says when he opens the door.

“Dude,” Patrick sways, unsure of how to respond when all he wants to do is shout and kick and scream but he knows it isn’t Pete he wants to kick up the ass. “I didn’t ask you to come, there wasn’t a rush.”

They eat toast in Patrick’s kitchen.

“So, abortion, adoption or, um, what’s a word for “keeping it” that begins with A?” Pete asks tactfully, spreading half a jar of jelly onto one piece of toast.

“Still not sure.” Patrick isn’t really hungry. His stomach feels a little uneasy, whether because of morning sickness or general anxiety he can’t tell. “I’d probably make a terrible parent.”

“Dude, kids love you!” Pete says with his mouth full.

“A lot more than I love them,” Patrick replies, picking a piece of toast into little shreds.

“Yeah, but you’d love _your_ one.” Pete flashes him a raspberry red smile. He has a pip between his huge, shiny teeth.

“Everyone loves _their own_ kids," Says Patrick, staring at the seed as though it interests him more than the conversation until Pete picks it out.

“That’s the point. No one wants to spend two years teaching _someone else’s_ kid to shit in a plastic toilet or blow their nose when it’s full of boogers.”

There’s a lull in the conversation and Patrick eats some of his shredded toast to make it seem less awkward.

“Will you come with me to the clinic on Monday?” It’s weird to say it. Up until his argument with Mark on the phone, Patrick had been operating in the assumption that he wouldn’t have the baby, but without really committing to the idea of having an abortion either. Pete had mentioned adoption, but frankly half of what Patrick is trying to avoid is a baby and the other half is navigating the world as a pregnant dude.

“Sure. Do you want me to drive you?”

Patrick looks at Pete and nods. He’s not used to Pete being so serious, or so calm, but he’s grateful for it. “Thanks.”

“Friends don’t let friends go to abortion clinics in argyle sweaters, Trick.” The serious slides from Pete’s face and Patrick can no longer tell if Pete is trying to make light of the situation or if he genuinely considers himself some kind of Planned Parenthood wingman.

“Thanks, probably,” Patrick looks down at his sweater doubtfully. It’s hard to tell if his tummy is real, infant-filled tummy or if he’s just getting fat. For the first time ever, he hopes it’s the latter. “D’you wanna just hang out? Play some games or something?”

They spend the afternoon on Patrick’s couch. Patrick goes through a few cycles of being distracted and trying to hide the fact that he’s occasionally overwhelmed by melancholy, but for once Pete’s attention isn’t focussed inwards and he seems to pick up on it. They end up watching The Simpsons instead of gaming.

When they break for more food Patrick glances at the clock and sees that it’s 3pm. “God damn, it’s been a long twenty-four hours.”

Pete reaches over and squeezes his shoulder like he had the night before. Patrick almost shrugs it discretely off, like he isn't used to it anymore - it hasn't been so long though, since the tour. “Things’ll work out.”

“Are you upset I never told you? About… Any of it, I guess?” Patrick asks, forgetting about how it takes two to keep the conversation carefree.

Pete shrugs. He smiles a little, but it fades quickly into something unreadable. “I dunno. It’s not really that important right now, is it?”

Patrick goes to look for a takeout menu and tries to dry his eyes without Pete noticing (it’s all hormones, he tells himself). It’s probably a lost cause, but there’s a lot of things they don’t talk about, and one more topic can’t hurt.

By the time Pete leaves in the evening, Patrick’s phone has two missed calls – one from his mother, and one from Mark. He ignores them both and turns out the light.

 

* * *

 

 

Pete picks him up at 10AM on Monday morning, or he tries to, but even fire wouldn’t get Patrick out of bed before eleven, so of course he’s slept through his alarm. He hasn’t eaten or drunk anything since the night before because he forgot to find out whether he was allowed before the procedure.

Pete looks a little grim and he’s trying too hard to keep things cheerful, but he does say he thinks it’s a good idea to call first, so Patrick does, but he bottles out when the woman on the phone calls him _sir_ and tells her the appointment is for his girlfriend. Evidently this sets off a whole load of alarm bells for the receptionist who quizzes him for several minutes on whether he’s pressuring his imaginary girlfriend into something she doesn’t want, but he manages to convince her that he should be seen as soon as possible.

“They’re gonna have to find out at some point, you know,” Pete tells him, having overheard the lie, and Patrick winces.

“I’d rather later than sooner.”

The clinic itself is not far from Mark’s place, which makes Patrick uncomfortable. The receptionist doesn’t recognise his voice from the phone, or else she’s not the one who took his call, and seems to assume that he and Pete are a couple in for a check-up. She asks them to fill out a form each, entitled Men Who Have Sex With Men.

Patrick takes the clipboards anyway, and they sit on the plastic chairs next to a set of double doors, just out of earshot, Patrick’s palms sweating so badly that they leave dark prints on his pants when he wipes them.

“Fourteen weeks is pretty late, isn’t it?” He asks Pete, who is making a vague attempt at the form.

“Huh?”

“To get rid of it. Fourteen weeks, that’s quite developed.”

Pete gives him a look. “You said it was three inches long. You always said you thought wom- people should be able to get an abortion whenever they wanted.”

“Yeah,” Patrick finds himself exasperated. “But I never said it wouldn’t be a factor I considered _if I_ was pregnant myself.”

Pete doesn’t say anything.

“Think of all the people who might want this baby, Pete. I bet there are thousands of childless couples out there trying to adopt a baby,” Patrick whispers.

Pete crosses one of the boxes on the form. “There are also thousands of toddlers and older kids who need homes that those people aren’t adopting because they’re not young enough or they’re emotionally fucked, or they’re disabled.”

“Are you boys finished with your forms?” The receptionist calls over to them.

“Not yet!” Patrick shouts back, voice strained and thin. “I know. I know. It’s just… What if I can never have another kid? I mean, I might not be able to _get_ pregnant again, not that I want to, but obviously I can’t get anyone else knocked up either…”

“Patrick!” Pete hisses at him, setting his clipboard aside on a coffee table covered in pamphlets. “Do you actually want to get rid of this thing or are you finding bad excuses because you just want to keep it?”

Patrick locks his eyes with Pete’s, but they don’t offer him any answers. For a minute he just stares, watching the receptionist’s silhouette reflected in Pete’s lenses. “I can’t keep it. I’m twenty-two, I’m single, I’d have to quite touring…”

Pete’s hands bracket his shoulders and squeeze too hard to be comforting. “You have us. We’d make it work if you wanted it to work, Patrick.”

“I’m a guy! I’m transgender! I’d be like, eight or nine months pregnant when the album comes out and we’re meant to start touring.” The receptionist is staring, Patrick can see her tiny reflection turn to look at them. He keeps his voice as low as possible.

“Dates can be moved. We would make it work.” The bones in Pete’s wrists click. His grip is tight and he holds Patrick close enough that he can whisper so that the receptionist can’t listen in.

“I don’t know. How am I meant to-” Patrick doesn’t even know the questions. He has no idea how much of his decision to be here was based off of his actual desires and how much was his brain looking over their plans and deciding that the alternative simply wasn’t possible. “Someone like me can’t raise kids, Pete.”

“Bullshit!” Pete says, loud enough that the receptionist clears her throat. He lowers his voice. “That’s bullshit! Someone like you? Look - You don’t have to decide this today, Trick.”

“Excuse me!” The receptionist half-shouts, and Pete lets Patrick go. “If you’re going to cause a scene-“

The double doors swing open and a clinician in with a white coat and a clipboard of her own steps through. “Ms Stump?”

It’s been a few years since that title had been directed at Patrick rather than his aunt.

“Not here,” Says the receptionist tersely. “Never checked in.”

“Uh, actually,” Patrick tries to speak up, but his voice seems stuck in his throat. “I’m, uh, it’s me who has the appointment.”

The clinician eyes him sharply over the tops of her glasses, and he thinks she’s about to demand he explain right there in the waiting room. It’s only himself, Pete and the receptionist in there, but even then it feels too much.

In the end, she doesn’t. “Please come through,” She says instead, her voice unaffected, if a little cold.

“Uh,” Patrick stands and then turns back to Pete.

Pete frowns, looking lost as Patrick leaves him behind. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want. You have time, you don’t have to decide now, Trick.”

“I’ll see you when I’m done,” Patrick tells him, and follows the woman through to an examining room.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings (that are also spoilers) at the end of the chapter.  
> I've not had a chance to proof-read this so apologies for the inevitable spelling mistakes.

The room is clean and clinical, a lot like his doctor’s office, except that the bed has stirrups, and the very sight of it terrifies him. The woman directs Patrick to sit in a chair across from her desk instead.

“My name is Dr Asan, and I perform check-ups for pregnant women and sometimes terminations here at the clinic,” She tells him. “I, uh, was expecting a woman.”

“Y-yes. Sorry,” Patrick stammers. “I, uh, sort of, _am_ pregnant.”

“You’re pregnant.” Her voice is neutral but her scepticism obvious.

“I’m… Transgender,” Patrick feels sick. He wishes Dr Muller could do the procedure for him. “I… Used to be a woman.”

Patrick winces at his own choice of phrase, and Dr Asan’s face doesn’t change.

"You mean like a sex change?"

Patrick winces at  _her_ choice of phrase, but nods. "I still have, um, a womb and..."

Dr Asan blinks and writes something down on her clipboard. "Okay. How far along are you?”

“Fourteen weeks, I think.” Patrick stares past her but his gaze ends up on the stirruped bed, and he casts his eyes to the floor immediately. “I was on the contraceptive injection, so I’m not really sure.”

“And you want an abortion?”

"Uh, I... I, so..." Blood rushes loud through Patrick’s ears. It can't be that simple, he can't believe that the mammoth decision in front of him boils down to answering this one question, right here, right now. It's too easy. It doesn't feel right. He doesn't know what kind of solution he'd been expecting her to offer, but he'd been expecting _something_. Some kind of decision making process, where she'd ask him a series of vaguely related questions and at the end tell him with empirical certainty that an abortion was the best thing, and he would be convinced. He closes his eyes and sucks in a deep breath, and another, and another. His hands feel clammy and cold. He must look ridiculous. He has no choice. He has to make _a_ choice. It's too big of a decision, and what the hell did they teach in health classes if he could reach this point and still not know how this works? He can’t have a baby, he just _can’t_. His belly will grow, people will be able to tell. He has photographs snapped of him whenever he goes to the store, he can’t have a goddamn _baby_. Mark doesn’t want to have a child with him. He’s never met another transgender adult and he’s certainly never heard of one raising a child, let alone carrying one and giving birth to it. 

“Breathe slowly,” Dr Asan is telling him. “You’re hyperventilating.”

“I don’t know! I don’t know.” Patrick’s face is hidden in his hands, his short nails catching at his scalp. “I don’t know what I want to do.”

“We could go over your options.”

Patrick presses his fingers into his eyelids until he can see stars. He tries to breathe slower and tells himself that this is the question-answer session he'd been imagining. “What are they?”

“It’s too late for you to have a medical abortion, but we could still give you a surgical one,” Dr Asan explains to Patrick’s bowed head. “The medical abortion is a pill, the surgical abortion is where we remove the foetus manually. We can do it under sedation or just with painkillers here, but if you’re further along than 18 weeks, you’d need to go to a hospital to have it under general anaesthesia. It has some risks and complications, but so does pregnancy, and obviously it doesn’t result in a baby.”

Patrick swallows the taste of bile, more to do with panic than disgust, and keeps his eyes shut tight and his breathing as regular as he can. It's not easy when instead of a list of minor pros and firm cons to having his pregnancy, his options seem to be more methods of getting rid of it.

“There’s always adoption, but someone under as much scrutiny as yourself might find that very difficult, especially under the circumstances.”

Patrick looks up at her in alarm, it not having occurred to him before that he could be recognized here. “I have confidentiality here, right?”

“Of course.” Dr Asan picks up a pen from her desk, clicks it, and begins to tick things off on a checklist of her own, giving no further sign that she knows who he is. “You have three weeks to decide what you want to do if you want it done here. After that, all I can do is refer you on.”

“Thanks,” Patrick tells her and stands up, swaying slightly.

“I wanted to ask you a few-“ She starts to say, but the words are cut off by the door to the office closing behind Patrick as he rushes out of the office and into the accessible toilet across the hallway, just making it to the bowl before he retches and throws up the breakfast he didn’t have.

He hasn’t turned on the light, but he can’t even stop retching for long enough to look up as someone’s shadow cuts across the light from the corridor shining through the gap in the open door.

“I saw you run out the room,” Pete says as he turns on the light and locks himself in the bathroom with Patrick. “What happened?”

Patrick tries to breathe without gagging and spits. Pete crouches down next to him, one hand going to its usual place on Patrick’s shoulder and the other rubbing over his back. After a minute of panting, Patrick sits back on his heels, keeping his watering eyes closed. He shakes his head. “I don’t know what to do.”

“You don’t have to decide today,” Pete repeats what he’d said earlier. “You have time.”

“Three weeks,” Patrick grimaces. “But I’m not gonna know what to do in three weeks either.”

Patrick pushes himself so that he’s sitting cross legged with the back of his head resting against the wall. Pete flushes the toilet and sits next to him. “Don’t worry about the band. Whatever you do, we’ll manage. We’ll make it work just like other bands do around all their family shit.”

“I’d have to tell Joe and Andy.”

“It’ll be fine,” Pete rubs his knee. “I can tell them if you like.”

“God knows what _you’d_ say.” It sounds meaner out loud, but Patrick is miserable and pregnant and he’s pretty sure that’s licence.

Pete sighs. “What do you want to do?”

“Right now? I wanna wait until I’m sure that doctor isn’t waiting outside the door and then I wanna go get breakfast.” He probably shouldn't be hungry when he can still taste stomach acid in his mouth, but he's pregnant, and he is.

 

 

They make it to the ugly Glenview IHOP before Patrick was even scheduled to have the procedure according to that morning's phone call, and they take a booth near the back. The lunch crowd is in, and some of the local teenagers are gawking.

“I feel like they can already tell or something,” Patrick mumbles to Pete beneath the clatter of forks and voices.

“They can’t.” Pete puts the menu upright to provide a barrier between them and the room, to negligible effect, and leans in to listen.

“But if I stay like this, they will. And I don’t want people seeing me like that.”

A waitress appears as if from nowhere to take their order. Once they’ve made their selection she stays nearby. “I’m a massive fan,” She admits after too long of staring.

This effectively closes the conversation whilst they eat pancakes, Patrick wolfing his down like he's been underfed for weeks and Pete picking at his in a way that suggest he's more nervous than he's been letting on.

“You still have three weeks to think this over,” Pete tells him as they head back to the car.

“Yeah.” With a full stomach, three weeks doesn’t seem so bad. He can think on it, and at the end of the time, he’ll go with his gut.

“You should talk it over, with your mom, or with the guys. Or me,” Pete says as they pull out.

“I don’t wanna tell them. The less people who know the better, if I’m going to get rid of it.” It doesn’t stop him from having Pete stop at the drug store at the end of his road. He buys a month’s worth of folic acid and some more anti-sickness medicine.

 

 

Two and a half weeks later, and Patrick is no longer nauseous. He doesn’t feel great, and he’s peeing a lot, but it’s a relief to no longer be throwing up everywhere. Rather than coming to any great conclusions about his situation, he’s spent most of the time in a state of anxiety and mourning his relationship with Mark. He’s definitely gained weight, but he’s willing to bet that more of it can be attributed to ice cream rather than to his expanding uterus.

He’s been to band practice and finished another song, but it took longer than usual – he was distracted and so was Pete. Fortunately, Andy can put drums to a song after hearing it only once and the only thing keeping Joe from relaxing himself into a coma is his constant levels of excitement about music, so neither of them kick up a fuss, even if Joe seems increasingly irritated with the pace things are moving at.

Maybe Patrick’s been thinking about Joe more than usual, because he ends up in that Borders where they first met, browsing books as a way to procrastinate going home and thinking about sorting out his host-parasite relationship problems.

It’s just coincidence that the music biography section and the pregnancy and childrearing sections are so close together. He looks around to check no one is watching and pulls out a handful from the pregnancy section. One is only about childbirth, and another about alternative medicine that seems to be telling him to avoid qualified doctors at all costs, and one is “For Dads” but the information all seems to be about putting up with your pregnant wife and what to do if she has a miscarriage, so he puts them all back.

A very pregnant woman is standing a few feet away leafing through the early years parenting section. He catches her eye by mistake.

“I think it’s very nice that you’re looking for a way to support your girlfriend,” She says kindly. “Now, if I could just get my husband reading those books…”

Patrick laughs, uncomfortable. “It’s for a friend, actually. Uh, she didn’t want to buy one herself.”

The woman looks at him with mild amusement, but then points out a book on a lower shelf. “That one’s good. All the rest are condescending or out of date, or else they talk so much about complications you’ll lose your mind.” She gives a strained laugh and puts both hands protectively over her stomach.

“Thanks,” Patrick grabs the book as quickly as he can, sliding it between The History of Ska and a recipe book he’d picked up with his mom in mind.

He ends up lining up three different times and pretending at the last moment that he’s forgotten something until he finally gets the one middle aged man working the till and not one of the three teenagers, two of whom are watching him owlishly. The pregnancy book is unreasonably expensive, but Patrick has enough money that he’s not willing to change his mind and risk further exposure to take it back. He takes his bag and leaves as fast as possible, keeping his eyes to the ground as though he’s a weedy, unpopular sixteen year old and fame is the group of jocks who’d threatened to kick the shit out of him.

 

 

Even though it feels like plain morbid curiosity, the first thing Patrick does when he gets home is to look up where he is on the scale of one to baby in the baby book. He’s almost 17 weeks and the book tells him that the foetus is about five inches long. He feels guilty for allowing it to get so big when he could’ve dealt with it when it was only the size of his thumb.

The size is shown curled in the womb of a line-drawn woman, and her belly is noticeably distended in the image. This sends Patrick to his bathroom for a comparison and the horrifying revelation that his stomach does indeed extend out further than usual. He has just enough flab that it looks like weight gain, but it wasn’t like that two weeks ago. It just wasn’t.

He takes off his shirt to really look at himself, and when he does, he notices that his nipples look bigger and darker, and the hair on his chest is thinned to a few wiry hairs that persist miserably in the wake of their fallen brethren. His freckles really do look frecklier.

This news is all incredibly depressing, and Patrick dives into bed despite it being four in the afternoon to mope and feel disheartened in the dark on his own. He hasn’t spoken to Mark since he put the phone down on him, and although he’s visited his mom, he still hasn’t actually told her anything. So far, this is between himself, Mark, Pete, his doctor, the entirety of a Planned Parenthood clinic and some woman at the book store. But not the rest of his friends or family.

He texts Pete.

_What if I keep it?_

It takes Pete half an hour to respond, during which time Patrick begins to worry that his friend is having a private crisis about Patrick’s continuing role in the band.

_thn ul have 2 stop eating cheetoz nd start eating stuff andy thinks is food_

_I wouldnt be able 2 tour when were meant to tho. I wouldnt be able 2 record wen we r meant 2 bc I would be 2 pregnant and people would know,_ Patrick texts back.

_th label will jus have to manage_

_it might make my dysphoria really bad tho. its already making it worse_

_dysphoria?_

Patrick sighs. _nvm._

_i do mind._

_Trick?_

_do u want me 2 come bck to planned prnthood w you on fri?_

_?_

Patrick considers the offer. _Idk. ill ask closr to the time?_

_Jus rmmbr its alrdy tues._

Patrick doesn’t text back after that. He’s aware of the time constraints and he’s already stressed as hell about his own indecision. He gets out of bed and has a dinner of ice cream, folic acid, antacids and a handful of leaves from the fridge which he hopes will balance out the pint of phish food he's just consumed.

 

By Friday morning, Patrick still hasn’t texted Pete back. He’s not entirely shocked to find that it’s Pete who has rudely buzzed him awake at 9am when he opens his front door.

Pete looks uncomfortable and expectant, as though Patrick is about to greet him with his decision on the doorstep.

There’s something oddly final about Pete’s presence that Patrick doesn’t fully welcome, but he lets him in anyway. Pete goes to sit at Patrick’s kitchen table, and Patrick follows him to where he’d first revealed he was pregnant and sits with him in silence, both of them staring off into the mess of Patrick’s kitchen.

“I looked up dysphoria,” Pete says eventually. He offers no more information.

Patrick can’t look at him. He finds it almost impossible tear his gaze from the milky reflection of himself in a ladle he’d been forced to use as a cereal bowl the other day. “I’m scared.”

“I know.” Pete fiddles with the sleeves of his hoody.

Patrick has nothing more to say, so he stares at the ladle until his vision blurs too much for him to focus on it any longer, and then he closes his eyes. It causes the tears welling up in them to roll down his face. Patrick silently blames them on the hormones.

“Shit, okay,” Pete swears, putting his hand on the table close to Patrick as though he can’t tell if touching him is the right thing to do. “I’m sorry, Trick.”

Patrick takes a deep breath through his nose which ends up a long, wet sniff. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“No, but, I’m sorry everything sucks.” Pete prods him gently in the arm. It’s such a pathetic gesture that it makes Patrick laugh.

He wipes his face on the collar of the t-shirt he slept in. “I think,” He swallows, “That you have to be sure, if you’re going to get rid of it. And I’m not sure. Oh God…”

Pete waits and politely fails to notice Patrick wiping his nose on his own t-shirt.

“I looked it up and twenty-four weeks is the latest you can get rid of it. If I become sure between now and 24 weeks, I’ll get rid of it. And if I don’t, I won’t.” It’s the closest thing to a conclusion that Patrick’s managed to come up with over a period of three whole weeks, and it isn’t much, but it’s all he’s got.

“Sounds… sensible.”

“Yeah. I don’t feel any better though.” He’s hardly an alcoholic, but Patrick could really do with a beer right now. Maybe several.

Pete shrugs. “What’re you gonna tell the guys? The offer’s still there if you wanted me to tell them.”

Patrick groans. “Sooner is better, right? I should get it out of the way,” He says, unlike his position on every other aspect of this pregnancy.

“How d’you wanna do it?” Pete asks. “You sure I can’t do it for you?”

Patrick turns his head sharply, finally making eye contact but also making Pete shrink away from him. “Pete, you didn’t _say anything_ did you?”

“No!” Pete puts his hands out in front of him. “Not _really_!”

“ _Not really?”_ Patrick growls.

“No – I just – I might have mentioned that I was upset about something. I didn’t say what it was, just that it was something to do with you, and…” Pete trails off.

“You’re “upset about something,” Pete?” Patrick glares at him coldly. Suddenly he doesn’t feel nearly so supported as he had when Pete had turned up to take care of him.

Pete grimaces. “It’s not like that…”

Hatred doesn’t come naturally to Patrick, but unfortunately anger does, and he’s always been quicker to get fired up with Pete. “Then tell me, what is it _like_?”

Pete combs his fingers through his hair, making it worse. “I was upset that you knew me for years and you never told me you were… That you never said anything, like you didn’t trust me, okay?”

Patrick sighs, his anger ebbing away to something more like frustration. “It wasn’t _about_ you.”

“I know. And I know I said it didn’t matter to me, but it does. I thought… I knew things had been strained the last few months, but I thought we knew everything about each other. You know _everything_ about me, Patrick. And then it turns out that there’s this massive aspect of your life that you never even mentioned...” Pete swallows loudly, turning his face away from Patrick. “So yeah, I was upset. And I told Andy, but I didn’t tell him why.”

“It’s not that I didn’t trust you,” Patrick says after a pause. “I just… I was seventeen, and I really admired all of you, and I desperately wanted to fit in and be one of the guys and have you all _like_ me and after that, when I hadn’t told you and I already knew you and you were one of my best friends, I just couldn’t. I didn’t want you to think that I’d lied to you. And I didn’t want you to think of me differently, because I really liked what we had.”

Pete turns back just in time to see Patrick dashing away more tears, but his own eyes look red too. Patrick shifts uncomfortably. There’s usually a very strict boundary between when Pete will pretend he’s fine and laugh off all and any pain, and when he’s in one of his depressive moods and wants everyone to know about it. And it’s rare for Patrick to be the direct cause of that pain.

“I’m sorry –“ They both begin at the same time, and they both cut off suddenly. Patrick wishes the table wasn’t between them.

“Do you wanna just get out of here and go for breakfast?” Pete asks when Patrick doesn’t continue.

“Sure.” Patrick stands and so does Pete, but instead of leading the way out of the door, Pete cuts Patrick off. They haven’t hugged properly in a long time, and Patrick buries his face in Pete’s shoulder and holds him tight whilst the threat of tears abates. Pete smells like he always has, except the tang of aftershave and deodorant is missing. The realisation that Pete has stopped wearing strong smells because Patrick is pregnant only makes Patrick want to cry even more. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

Pete doesn’t reply, but he wipes his eyes subtly on the sleeves of his hoody when Patrick pulls back. “So. Breakfast.”

In the end, they get drive thru. It’s just easier to stay in Pete’s car where no one can observe Patrick's puffy eyes and occasional shudders. They don’t talk about anything important. Patrick doesn’t think he’s ever truly appreciated what it means to have a best friend before this point in time. He doesn’t let himself dwell on what it means now, either, because he knows that’s only going to start the whole cycle of catharsis all over again.

 

 

The conversation needs to happen, and it needs to happen soon, before Patrick can no longer hide behind carefully chosen fashion disasters and what is fortunately an increasingly seasonal dependence on cardigans. He tells Pete he’s going to talk to Joe and Andy after band practice.

As he has ever since he bought the pregnancy book, he takes the seat furthest from Andy’s kit, next to Pete on the polished wooden bench. He’d read that loud noises now could be bad for the foetus and he doesn’t want to damage its hearing if he hasn’t already.

They start off playing Fame<Infamy to warm them up a little and so Pete can change something in the baseline (it’s a _no_ from Patrick, but he knows it’s best to save these arguments for when they’re recording for real), and Joe’s amp almost drowns Patrick’s playing completely. When he thinks no one is looking, he nudges it down.

“Listen,” Joe turns on him, silencing the strings with his fingers. Patrick stops playing, followed by Andy and then Pete. “Are you sick of the fucking band?”

“What? No-“ Patrick throws up an arm and flicks his pick at Joe by accident.

“Because it sure seems like you are!” Joe bats the pick out the air with the neck of his guitar.

“Joe, it’s fine, he’s not-“ Pete tries to interject.

“No, it’s not fine, and he _is_. You’re late to practice, you’re distracted, you hardly work on any songs – it took eight days for you to finish with the main melody of this fucking song, and you’re still not happy about it,” Joe doesn’t lose his shit often, but for someone so chilled out, he sure has a lot of complaints. “We’ve barely seen you outside of practice and it doesn’t even feel like you notice us when you _are_ here! I really care about what we make, and if you don’t anymore, if there’s somewhere you’d rather be, why don’t you just go?”

“I’m pregnant,” Patrick blurts out.

Joe stares at him with eyes full of hurt and then pulls the strap over his head, setting his guitar with a thump onto the floor and storming out. “Thanks for listening to my concerns and making fucking fun of them, Patrick!”

Patrick blinks. A part of him had been preparing for this to go badly, but he hadn’t expected to not be believed. He knew it was kind of unbelievable, but he’d thought he would be able to explain. He looks round to Pete who himself looks exasperated, and then back at Andy, whose face is unreadable.

“You know, he kind of has a point,” Andy says quietly.

Patrick rubs his temples and sighs. He lets his hand block Pete from view.

“Why did you say that?” Andy asks, smiling awkwardly, voice as soft as ever. He doesn't sound amused and were he any less gentle than Patrick knows he is, it might sound threatening.

Pete keeps his silence. Patrick had made him promise not to reveal anything more before they arrived.

“Because it’s true,” Patrick strokes the strings on his guitar. He’d meant to do this as an adult, to sit Joe and Andy down and look them in the face as he told them.

“I’m going to need you to explain that to me in a little more detail.” Andy still sounds so calm and curious that Patrick does manage to look at him.

“I’m… Do you know what transgender is?” Patrick feels himself blushing. He can’t tell if he’s ashamed to admit it or just of never having done so before.

“Yeah.” Andy puts his sticks down on the floor next to him.

“What?” Pete asks bluntly. Patrick had assumed that Andy meant he knew what transgender was, not about Patrick himself being trans, but…

“When we were touring for Take This, a needle fell out your bag, so I checked in it to see why you had it and I found a bottle of something. I didn’t know what it was, so I looked it up.”

Patrick should probably be outraged at Andy for going through his stuff, but somehow he finds it hard to imagine a world in which Andy would casually ignore what could’ve been a spiralling drug addiction.

 “Delatestryl…” Patrick reaches up to feel the balding spot on his head. It actually seems to have more hair than usual. He wonders if it’s a side effect of the pregnancy. Speaking of which…

“And you’re pregnant?”

Patrick nods. “About seventeen weeks.”

“And you’re keeping it?” Patrick’s never asked Andy his stance on abortion. He’s always figured it would be similar to his stance on cows.

“I don’t know. I might.” Patrick watches Andy’s face for his reaction but doesn’t get one.

“Are you okay?”

“Not really,” Patrick says, but he still smiles at Andy’s ability to get the most information using the fewest words possible.

Andy smiles back. “I’ll go find Joe.”

He gives Patrick a friendly shake on his way by and follows Joe out the room.

Patrick turns to Pete. “That went well.”

“It half went well, though. Andy was way cooler than I was about it.” Pete unplugs his bass.

“Andy’s always cooler than you,” Patrick says.

“I’m pretty cool. I’m a cool dude,” Pete insists.

“Yeah, I know,” Patrick admits. He means to keep it jovial, but he ends up saying it with an intensity he hadn’t expected.

Pete smiles at him, something more tentative than his usual grin. “I’m glad we’re hanging out again, even if it’s only because…”

Patrick sighs. He wants to be able to say that the pregnancy has nothing to do with it, but if he did he’d be lying. He tips his head sideways until it bumps against Pete’s shoulder. “Me too. Sorry I’ve been so distant.”

Pete lets him rest his head there as Andy comes back down the stairs.

“He’s just outs— Oh, uh,” Andy stops in the stairway, watching them. “I’ll…”

He moves to back away but Patrick sits back up, the world spinning slightly as he rights himself. “No, I should go talk to him,” He says, trying to move on from the fact that he and Pete were clearly having A Moment as quickly as possible.

 

Joe is on the white swing chair in the Wentz’s front yard, squinting at the low angle of the sun as it disappears below the horizon. He couldn’t scowl any harder if he wanted to, but when he sees Patrick he tries anyway.

“I honestly don’t wanna see you right now, Patrick.”

“I know,” Patrick says, and sit next to him anyway. They swing themselves gently for a few minutes in silence, as the sun sinks lower and lower.

Joe’s agitation doesn’t subside though. He swings the chair a little harder, a little faster, until he’s pushing at the limits of what a garden swing seat has to offer and Patrick stops them by planting his feet hard against the ground, feeling his stomach roll and panting slightly from the motion sickness.

“I mean it for real, if you’re gonna come up here and talk to me like I’m just having a tantrum after months of your shitty behaviour,” Joe begins, keeping his voice down with conscious effort. He sounds irritated and angry, but not spiteful. Patrick’s stomach sinks a little lower as he thinks of how Joe is just another person he’d abandoned because he wasn't ready to open up about Mark. “Then you’ve got another thing coming, cos I seriously don’t want to hear—“

Patrick takes Joe’s hand in his own and presses it hard against his belly beneath his t-shirt.

“What the fuck are you doing?!” Joe wrenches his hand back and stands up, backing away a few steps as though Patrick might pounce on him.

“Uh,” Patrick says, and then realises that shoving Joe’s hand under his own clothes was probably unacceptable if Joe doesn’t believe he’s pregnant. “Um, I’m really _actually_ pregnant.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake, Patrick! I can’t believe you’re using this as a chance to screw me over, I thought you at least cared—“ Joe starts off towards the house and then turns around and walks right back up to him. “You know what, the least you could do, the _least_ you could do is to say you don’t wanna be in a band with me anymore! Instead of fucking us – _me –_ over for some weird, fucked up game!”

“I _do_ want to be in a band with you, Joe, jeez! I’m not trying to get rid of you or leave the band or whatever, and – and could you _please_ keep the noise down? I don’t want random people overhearing this conversation!”

Joe stares at him as though Patrick has arrived drunk to his grandmother’s funeral. “You don’t want people to hear you treating your band like crap? Or what? You don’t want people to hear you’re –“ He gestures wildly at Patrick in his entirety, “—Fucking pregnant?!”

“Yes!” Patrick hisses at him, looking around to ensure none of Pete’s suburban neighbours are watching. “That is _exactly_ what I don’t want strangers overhearing!”

Joe’s still staring at him, taking deep, gulping breaths to calm himself down. It seems to work, somewhat, but he still manages to make it sound like Patrick is doing it on purpose when he says, “Tell me you just pissed yourself and that isn’t blood on your pants.”

“What?” Patrick asks him blankly, a reply about how he isn’t trying to screw with Joe’s head dying on his tongue. He looks down at his jeans and sees the dark, wet spot over his crotch. Then he stands up and looks down at the chair to see the stain blossoming on the white cushion of the Wentz’s swing chair, stark and scarlet even in the dying light. As he stands up, he can feel a small stream of blood running down his inner thigh. “Oh.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for blood, threatened miscarriage.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, the cliffhanger at the end of last chapter seemed to horrify everyone, so I thought I'd upload the first part of what is the next chapter as a short bit on its own while I write the rest, so here is an awkwardly short chapter and now most of chapter 6 will be in chapter 7.  
> Any names of hospitals are made up because of reasons. (reasons like: plz don't sue me)

“Oh fuck oh fuck!” Patrick collapses forward onto the chair, somehow terrified and totally disconnected from his body at the same time.

“Fuck!” Joe concurs, his face falling into the perfect picture of surprise. He pushes Patrick up onto the seat. “I’ll – I’ll call an ambulance.”

He rushes back into the house and after a few seconds, Pete and Andy burst out, followed by Pete’s mom.

Patrick ignores their panicked conversation, his initial shock subsiding into something slower and more spaced out. He apologises to Dale for ruining her chair, and doesn’t hear her response. He takes out his phone and watches nine minutes pass by before the ambulance arrives, mumbling indistinct answers to questions he doesn't catch.

A paramedic with rough hands herds him onto a stretcher, and Patrick complies, stunned, before he’s loaded into the back of the ambulance with Pete and the paramedic, and they drive off.

He's going to hospital. These are medical professionals. It all seems mind-numbingly simple until the questions start.

The paramedic wants to cut Patrick’s pants off, he’s asking about insurance and medical history and his regular doctor and he wants to know if Patrick could’ve been injured. Most of them are questions Pete can’t answer, and Patrick’s mind doesn’t want him to say anything at all.

Eventually Pete must give enough information, because the radio in the front next to the driver crackles as the paramedic talks back and forth with the hospital.

“Yes, a man, a transsexual man!” The words bring Patrick half-way back into the ambulance. “No… Yes, he has sideburns and – no."

Patrick blinks at Pete's tense form, huddled close to Patrick's feet at the end of the wipeable mattress, and thinks of how strange it is that his sideburns should come into it. Pete puts a hand on his ankle and pats it. It's awkward and not very reassuring. 

"About a quarter unit so far, but – possible abruption… Yes, possible miscarriage. No, a man who used to be a woman, yes, a sex change... I said probable miscarriage--”

Patrick turns his head away from the voice and the lights and the machines and stares at the machines and equipment strapped to the wall. His body seems to be slowing down, lurching slightly and grinding to a gentle halt. Pete's hand on his leg feels incredibly heavy.

“Why are we stopping?” Pete asks behind him. “We’re not at the hospital yet!”

There’s a slight pause. The flashing lights in the ambulance light up the wall and cast strange shadows and it's hurting Patrick's eyes.

“The hospital won’t take him,” The paramedic says, voice flat.

Patrick closes his eyes and feels a fresh, warm trickle of blood run between his thighs.

“What?” Pete squeezes his leg, voice rising like Patrick’s does in an argument. Patrick doesn’t need to look at him to know he’s bordering on hysteria. He probably couldn’t look at him if he tried. It doesn’t feel like he could see anything at all.

The sounds in the ambulance are muted. “They just won’t take him. They don’t want to be responsible for treating someone – like him.”

The world spins around Patrick even though he can’t see it. He feels sick and dizzy, and there’s a ringing in his ears growing louder and louder; it feels like he’s hearing a much louder siren from somewhere much further away. His body is light, and maybe it's him who's spinning; it feels like he's being held down only by the weight of Pete's hand, pinning him to the stretcher with incredible force but not hurting him at all. He’s never fainted before, but he knows that's precisely what is happening right now, and there's nothing he can do to stop it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I heard you hated cliffhangers so I wrote you some more.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that I have whacked the rating up from teen to mature. This is because this chapter specifically contains a lot of triggering content - Please see notes at the end of chapter to find out the specific warnings for this chapter.

A few moments later, Patrick cracks an eyelid open. Or maybe more than a few moments, because he’s not in the ambulance, he seems to be in some kind of in-between room, processing urgent patients from ambulances into the ER.

The paramedic is discussing something with several doctors a few feet away, and Patrick tries to turn his head to look for Pete.

Pete sees him moving and plants himself in front of Patrick’s face, beginning to speak without preamble. “Can I call your mom? They don’t have your records here and I didn’t check if you wanted to call your mom, but you were out cold and I didn’t know if I should call her so I didn’t yet, but now you’re awake.”

Patrick tries to sit up, but he’s strapped to the bed. He can look down though, and although he’s in a clean gown he can see a spot of blood already, bright and red over his crotch. “Not unless I’m literally going to die.”

He wants to ask what’s happening and where he is, but the gravity of the situation is slowly coming back to him as the doctors jump into action, and he’s being taken away with a few hasty introductions for an exam before he can even begin to process the fact that the fluids coming out of him right now might contain the baby he’s been carrying for the last few months.

For while he's taken into an operating theatre and poked about, his blood pressure is taken and several people squint up at his crotch as though it might tell them something. There are words like "foetal pulse" and "abruption" and a dozen others that he can't understand, and a doctor or nurse is using some kind of weird tool to suck up the blood running out of him that feels very unpleasant. 

The hype seems to die down quickly, and he's wheeled off somewhere else.

He ends up in a private room without Pete, but with a tired looking middle-aged man named Dr Richards who has him shuffle from the bed he’s been strapped to and onto another one with stirrups on it without sitting up any further.

Patrick’s head is still behind on the action, and he fails to make the connection between the doctor approaching with gloved hands and the medical lubricant just beside him until his gown is being shoved out of the way and cold fingers push into him unannounced.

It’s uncomfortable and humiliating, and no one is talking to him; he feels like a trapped experiment rather than a patient. The doctor puts a hand on Patrick’s belly and feels around, pressing his fingers in as far as they can go from both inside and out.

“Ow!” Patrick hisses at him, but he doesn’t seem to take notice, prodding around for several incredibly long minutes, before pulling his fingers out too fast and replacing them with something cold and plastic that forces him open wider than he’s pretty sure anything was ever meant to go. Patrick bites his lip to avoid crying out, barely able to breathe until Dr Richards yanks that out as well, stripping his bloodied gloves off into the trash.  

Patrick lets his head fall back to the table, the ceiling lurching queasily above him.

“Wh-what’s happening?” His voice shakes, small and far away.

“Your cervix is still closed,” The doctor says without looking at him.

“What does that mean? Did I lose it?” Patrick tries to catch his eye and fails.

“We don’t know yet,” Dr Richards still doesn’t look up from the things he’s writing down.

Patrick purses his lips together and pushes his own gown down. He wants to take his legs out of the stirrups, but he doesn’t want to ask if he’s allowed. It is the worst kind of naked that he’s ever been.

After a few minutes, Dr Richards puts his file back into the holder at the end of the bed he’s just moved out of, and leaves Patrick alone in the room.

Patrick expects him to be back in a minute, but five minutes go by and he’s still on his own. Now that he has the time to think, his abdomen does hurt. He knows he heard the paramedic say _possible_ miscarriage, but won’t he lose the baby for sure if no one actually comes to give him any treatment? Will they have to take out his womb? Will he have to deliver it? Or is this the hospital that doesn’t want him and they’re just leaving him here whilst they sort out what they’re going to do?

Do they not understand that this is urgent? Patrick had known it wasn’t just his band he’d need to contend with if he wanted to keep it. He’d been aware that the media would jump on him like a pack of starving dogs, he’d known about the gossip magazines and the whispering neighbours and the radio hosts. He’d even known that the hospital visits would be awkward. 

But he’d still expected someone to treat him.

The reality of the mess he’s in seems so much bigger now than it had this morning. This morning he’d been pregnant, sure, but he was surrounded by people who would support him. And now here he is, alone in a hospital room, possibly not pregnant at all, with his legs in fucking stirrups, and he can feel a single drop of blood drip onto the table beneath him.

It’s sickening, Patrick feels betrayed and disgusted by the doctor, the hospital that turned him away, the staff who are leaving him to wait, and his own body which is clearly determined to fuck him over at every single opportunity. He’s glad it’s gone; he wants the whole lot gone, he wants there to be no hole to bleed out of, for them to take his ovaries to the incinerator and cut out his womb so it can never do this to him again. He’s not glad it’s gone at all. He’s not disappointed either; instead, he's just generally horrified about absolutely everything.

He brings his hand up to dash away his tears only to notice that there’s blood on his fingers and he can’t do anything about it – can’t get off the table, can’t sit up, can’t just wipe them anywhere because it’s mostly dried. He sobs, and the plasterboard hospital walls simply drink the sound in, confining his existence to the small examining room, with the tangy smell of his own blood choking its former sterility.

After almost twenty minutes, there’s lingering activity outside the door, and Patrick turns his face away as it finally opens, but he can’t seem to stop crying.

“Patrick,” Pete is there and Patrick is at once horrified and relieved; he doesn’t want Pete to see him like this, not at all, but he doesn’t want to be alone either.

“What’s happening?” He asks, reaching for Pete and burying his face against Pete’s chest in spite of a small protest from the doctor who followed Pete in. Pete squeezes both of his shoulders tightly and starts to say something, but he’s cut off.

“You’re at the Saint Francis,” The doctor behind Pete, a woman in her thirties tells him. “You’ve had a placental abruption, which means your placenta has come away from your uterus.”

Patrick groans into Pete’s sweater and tries to talk without his voice shaking. “Is it… Did I lose the…?”

“Your foetus was monitored on the way here and in the theatre, and still had a strong heartbeat half an hour ago, but whether or not you have a miscarriage is going to depend on how big the abruption was,” She continues. Patrick finally manages to pull his face away from Pete to look at her. She’s holding electrodes of her own. “I’m going to place these sensors on your belly now, and they’ll allow us to monitor Baby’s heartbeat, and then I’m going to examine you again.”

“Don’t look,” Patrick tells Pete half-heartedly as she pushes up his gown to stick the electrodes on. They feel cold and uncomfortable, like everything else in the room.

“I won’t,” Pete stares pointedly at the headboard. He reaches out until his hand touches Patrick’s shoulder, and then seems to think better of it and draws it back.

“Look here.”

Patrick does, ignoring the fact that Pete had obviously peaked when told to look. There’s a small screen displaying a line jumping up and down at an alarming rate. “It’s too fast…”

“It's very normal for it to have a very fast heartbeat. Now the exam, and then we’ll need to find out how bad the abruption is.”

Patrick does his best to ignore the second, gentler exam. He wishes Pete weren't there to see it, can't bear the massive amount of recognition this part of his body is suddenly getting. He feels sick. 

“Okay,” Says the doctor when she’s done, pulling the gown back down. “I’m going to do an ultrasound. We can get rid of the stirrups and you can go back to the other bed now.”

Patrick waves Pete’s assistance away, and after a small amount of heaving around and shuffling over, he’s lying on his back on the original bed with the blue paper equivalent of a blanket over his lap. The table with the stirrups has a smear of blood on it, but nothing like what happened earlier. Patrick can't look at it, not knowing where it came from. 

While the doctor is distracted by the ultrasound machine and Pete leans down until his mouth brushes Patrick’s ear. “They think I’m the father.”

“What?” Patrick hisses back, forgetting the blood entirely.

“They wouldn’t let me in otherwise!” Pete shrugs apologetically, but the doctor is facing them again and there's no time to question him further.

“Pete!” Patrick groans again, under his breath this time. The only thing worse than the press finding out he’s pregnant would be for them to find out he was pregnant, think that Pete was the father and then subsequently find out that it was actually Mark. Still, he can’t bring himself to be angry at Pete for wanting to be in there with him, so he make an attempt at a smile of thanks. It doesn’t come off looking particularly happy – he’s pretty sure he looks like a character who’s made it to the last scene of a horror movie – but Pete doesn’t grovel, so he’s probably got the message.

Patrick watches Pete while the doctor pushes his gown up and spreads the gel onto his abdomen. He doesn’t watch Pete’s face, because he doesn’t know what he’ll see there, and he doesn’t want to find out. He doesn’t want to see the screen for the very same reason.

“You’ve had what we call a revealed placental abruption, but it looks as though the placenta is mostly still attached. If you look here you’ll see that there's a small clot, but most of the blood has actually run out of you. Even though it looked like a lot, it was probably only about six ounces,” She says, but Patrick still doesn’t dare look around.

He hazards a glance up at Pete’s face instead; Pete is transfixed, watching the screen unblinkingly. For some reason, that’s enough to get Patrick to look at it.

Honestly, he has no idea how anyone can look at the image in front of him and distinguish a blood clot from anything else. He’s missed the doctor indicating it, and now it’s just black and grey, and outlined in white, a baby. It’s at a weird angle to the scanner; he can make out the top of its head and the outline of its skull and shoulders, and one hand splayed out, five tiny fingers stretched as far as they can go.

“Your partner said you were just under eighteen weeks, but abruptions are very rare before twenty weeks. It’s possible the foetus is just a little small for its age. I’m going to get a nurse to take your blood, if you’re a certain blood type, we’ll give you an injection to reduce the risk of further complications.”

Pete and Patrick are both concentrating too hard on the screen to notice the word _partner_.

“Can I – can I get a picture of it? I haven’t really seen it yet.”

“You mean you haven’t even had your twelve week check-up?” The doctor looks at him a little severely.

“He only found out he was pregnant four weeks ago,” Pete interjects before Patrick has to say anything.

After a few minutes of recounting the last month and a series of wordless complaints from the doctor, she agrees to give him a full scan before he goes home.

Patrick is too tired to concentrate on much more; his blood is taken in vast quantities rivalling that which he has already lost, and he undergoes a series of increasingly repetitive tests, examinations and interrogations until finally, he’s wheeled into a private room for observation and Pete is told firmly to go home and not return before 10 am tomorrow.

It feels strange to be alone in the hospital without Pete or his family, but Patrick’s eyelids are too heavy to miss him for long.

 

 

Pete might not be allowed to return until ten, but Patrick is awoken at eight for a breakfast of pancakes so sad looking that they simply must know they’re in a hospital. They’re served with strawberries which have definitely been frozen.

Around 4 am, he'd asked if he could pee, and instead of being pointed to the nearest bathroom was handed a cardboard bedpan by a middle-aged nurse who clearly appreciated early mornings about as much as Patrick, and was only finally allowed to use the bathroom after he had refused to use the bedpan for half an hour and a doctor had again fingered him and found no more bleeding.

Apparently his main prescription is bedrest. There’s no TV in his room, and he has nothing to entertain him on his person – in fact, he doesn’t even know where his own clothes are, let alone his cell or whatever.

Clearly the universe is working against him, because he can’t get back to sleep and mostly what he wants to do is roll over and sleep on his front to block out the light streaming in through the inefficient blinds, but he can’t, because his belly is increasingly big and lying on his treacherous womb _now_  seems like a terrible idea. Now that it’s taken things one step further, gotten him pregnant and then threatened to send a dead thing out like the alien from Alien, and maybe take Patrick along with it, he can’t seem to break the constant awareness that it’s there. That these organs are in him, all fleshy and real and bloated with an increasingly present human body.

He’s rarely checked on, and no one comes to take away the remains of the pitiful, barely touched breakfast until Pete is well on his way to being late, although every few minutes he catches some member of staff peeking curiously through the little window in the door.

Patrick is going to die of boredom; he has no trust in the hospital staff to ask them for something to read, and he isn’t allowed to move on his own except (accompanied) to the toilet across the hallway and back. In the end, he uses being pregnant as an excuse to pee four separate times before Pete finally arrives in his garish purple hoodie closer to midday, which only makes him feel worse.

Patrick is about to say something along the lines of _why the hell are you so late,_ when Pete greets him with a, “Hey, sorry, I didn’t know if you wanted me to come, but, I thought…”

And then he has no idea what to say at all. _Of course I wanted you here!_ Seems too needy. He doesn’t want to backtrack to the snivelling mess he was last night, doesn’t want Pete to think he’d _needed_ him there. So instead he just says, “Hi.”

“Okay, so I thought the hospital food might be shitty, so I bought you some grapes, but then I thought grapes are kinda lousy so I bought you some McDonald’s fries instead. And then I realised I was hungry, and I didn’t know if you were even allowed fries, so I ate them, and then I thought you probably would like, smell them on me, and want some yourself, so I stopped by the cafeteria downstairs and bought you some of their fries and they’re kind of like, soggy, but I did manage to get them past that nurse who looks like she’s only here to kill off the patients by glaring at them,” Pete finishes his monologue by dumping a plate of pale-looking fries on the table next to Patrick, his smile wide and uncomfortable.

“Holy smokes, food!” Patrick doesn’t care that they’re luke-warm or terrible, he happily wolfs them down anyway. “You should’ve seen the crap they tried to feed me for breakfast.”

There’s an awkward pause while Patrick mostly shovels food into his mouth and Pete hovers by his bedside like a Victorian father who doesn’t want to appear so forward as to touch his ailing relative.

When Patrick is busy trying to swallow a particularly dry mouthful, he says, “So, I was thinking, if you wanted to sue the other hospital, my dad probably knows some good medical lawyers…”

“What?” Patrick croaks.

“The… One which wouldn’t take you,” Pete says uneasily.

It takes a minute of searching through the confusing memories of the night before for Patrick to realise that he was obviously not in the first hospital they'd tried to send him to.

“No way,” Patrick tells him flatly, accidentally spitting out half a french fry.

“What? Why the fuck not? Patrick, they could’ve _killed_ you!” Pete’s face is turning a strange shade of puce. He casts around for the chair and pulls it over, sitting down and suddenly looking oddly small but incredibly angry. He grips the railing of Patrick's hospital bed so hard it snaps into its downwards position.

“I’m here aren’t I?” Patrick shrinks back defensively.

“Yeah, no thanks to them! The guy in the ambulance had to call your family doctor, and _he_ said to come here and phoned ahead so one of his old friends from med school would be at the ER to make sure they took you in! You were out cold in the ambulance for _more than an hour_!” Pete’s voice is rising to disagree-about-the-bassline proportions. “They didn’t know it wasn't that serious! They were just as happy to let you bleed out in some fucking truck instead of taking you in!”

Patrick feels sick seeing Pete so shaken. He knows, and he had known, how messed up of a situation he’s in. But every time he keeps telling himself that it’ll be fine. Someone will sort it out and there’s just been an incredibly long and unfortunate series of misunderstandings. Also, he really needs Pete to keep it down so patients in the hallway or next door can't overhear any of this.

Pete pushes the railing back up and releases it to gently squeeze Patrick’s arm instead. He sighs and rests his head against the warm spot left by his hand on the rail. “Just – Trick, they just… They could’ve – Patrick they would’ve let you _die_. You can't just let them treat you like that.”

Patrick purses his lips, biting down on his cheek and breathing through his nose as slowly as he can. He’s glad Pete isn’t looking at him. When he can trust his voice not to shake, he says, “Pete. If I sue, people are gonna find out. People are gonna know I’m transsexual. People are gonna know I’m pregnant. The band doesn’t need that. I don’t need it.”

“But –“ Pete’s voice catches, and it occurs to Patrick that Pete might have his face turned down for a reason. “They- they shouldn’t just be allowed to get away with it!”

“I know. But I’m here now, and I’m fine, this hospital _is_ treating me. _The baby_ doesn't need that, either.” Patrick resolves never to tell Pete about Dr Richards and to hope he simply never sees the man again.

“Yeah,” Says Pete, a little wanly.

Patrick turns the wrist in Pete’s hand so that his palm faces upward. Pete looks at it for a moment and then seems to understand, taking it and squeezing it for as long as either of them dare before letting it go and sitting back in the chair.

They watch each other for a minute.

Pete opens his mouth to say something, just as the door bangs open, and Dr Richards marches in, followed by five other doctors in scrubs, proving once and for all that hope is a waste of time and that Patrick should just go and become a hermit somewhere, out of the public eye.

“Uh-“ Pete says. Patrick just shrinks back in the bed. The mattress is nowhere near forgiving enough to let him sink out of sight.

“This is the transsexual I was talking about, with the-“ Dr Richards begins, addressing the other doctors rather than Patrick.

“No fucking way, get out!” Pete stands up, chin height to Dr Richards but effectively herding him and his crowd back a step nonetheless.

“Excuse me – “

“You don’t have permission to teach in here, sorry, get out,” Pete says flatly. “This is not an exhibit.”

Dr Richards draws himself up, towering over Pete like most things tend to do, but his students scuttle away out the door behind him. “ _Excuse me_ ,” He repeats, “This is a valuable learning opportunity – “

“Here’s a learning opportunity for you, my Dad’s a lawyer. No permission. No entry. Out,” Pete stamps his foot lightly, almost toe-to-toe with the other man.

Patrick feels a sick sense of foreboding settle in his chest. He wants to reach out to pull Pete back, before Dr Richards can do anything like what he did to Patrick to Pete, but he’s not supposed to move and he doesn’t want to make anymore of himself visible to Dr Richards or his students.

Pete seems to have said the magic words however, because after a moment or two of glaring back at him, Dr Richards sweeps out, slamming the door behind him.

“What a dick!” Pete shouts, half to Patrick and half through the door. “What the hell does he think he’s doing, bringing his goddamn students round here? They know you’re high profile and they know that the more people see you in here, the more likely it is to leak. What the hell?”

He turns around to face Patrick, and Patrick knows he can’t tell him about the exam the day before. Even now, angry on his behalf, Pete just doesn’t know the half of it, and if he did… Well. His dad is a lawyer, but there’s no way a case like that involving Patrick would go unnoticed, and Patrick can’t think of anything worse.

“Dude are you okay?” Pete is by his bed again and back in his chair. “You look like you’re gonna be sick. Shall I call a nurse?”

Unfortunately for Patrick, that prediction has proved right on almost every occasion for the last two months. He can feel his face glistening with sweat. “I’m fine.”

Pete rests his hand on the railing, and Patrick watches it, trying to decide whether he wants Pete to touch him again or if the memory of last night has left him feeling too disgusting to want anyone’s hands on him at all.

After hours of waiting for some kind of entertainment, Patrick doesn’t exactly make the best use of Pete’s company; he doesn’t feel like hearing about Joe or Andy’s reaction to his having taken ill, or what Joe is feeling on the matter of his being pregnant. The mere idea of talking about it makes him feel sick with anxiety again, so they don’t. He ends up falling back to sleep at some point, only to be woken by the female doctor from the night before knocking neatly on the door before opening it.

“Good afternoon,” She says brightly, forcing Patrick to open his eyes and focus on her. Her badge reads _Dr Whyte, Obstetrics and Pediatric Health_. “Time for another examination.”

Pete’s phone bleeps depressingly as his snake bites its own tail, and he shoves it guiltily out of sight beneath his rumpled hoodie, purple and so fashionable that on anyone else it would be plain ugly. “I’ll, uh, wait outside.”

Dr Whyte looks at him strangely, and it’s only then it occurs to Patrick that a boyfriend not wanting to see his partner’s genitals to such a degree is an unusual thing. “Uh, could you get me a soda?”

“Sure,” Pete picks his way past Dr Whyte and leaves them alone.

Patrick is uncomfortably aware that he hasn’t had a shower in two days, but he goes along with it anyway, lying back in the bed with his knees up and spread. If he tells himself he’s used to it, he can almost ignore what’s happening, or he would be able to if it wasn’t being narrated in real time by the doctor.

“It looks like your cervix still has it’s plug of mucus even though blood did escape,” She says cheerfully, her head out of sight beneath the swell of his stomach.

Patrick is clearly meant to reply with something like “great” at this point, but when he opens his mouth all he manages to say is, “Gross.”

“There’s no more bleeding, we’ll be able to see on the ultrasound if any clots have appeared over night,” She carries on. “And then we’ll see about sending you home tomorrow.”

“Okay.” Patrick really wants this to be over.

“All done!” She removes her gloves in such a way that one ends up inside the other. "Let’s bring the ultrasound to you again, don’t want you going down to the antenatal clinic do we?”

“Uh, no… I guess not.” Patrick closes his legs.

“Bringing” the ultrasound machine is made all the more easy by the fact that it’s already in the room. Now that Patrick has the chance to give it his full attention without the fear of impending death, he can see that it is obviously superior to the one in Dr Muller’s surgery, or at least it has more buttons and it’s four times the size, and it lives on its own trolley.

Dr Whyte slathers him in cold medical lubricant and turns on the machine, spreading it out with the scanner. He gets a split second image of a foot before she utters a soft “oh” and turns it off again.

“What is it?” He sits up as best he can to look at his own stomach. It really is quite prominent now, glistening with pale blue gel. “Is something wrong?”

“Oh, no, I just realised, your boyfriend is still outside.”

Patrick has a moment of panic until he realises that the boyfriend she’s referring to is not Mark but Pete. “Oh. Well…”

“I’ll just go get him, shall I?” She smiles widely and leaves before Patrick can respond.

Pete trails Dr Whyte back to the side of the bed, dragging his uselessly small backpack across the floor.

“So,” She says. “We’re going to do your eighteen week scan, whatever week this does turn out to be, and if all goes well, you’ll be out of here midday tomorrow, you just need one more night of observation.” Then she turns to Pete. “You will need to make sure he stays in bed of course. No work, no exercise, especially anything that involves moving his abdomen too much, and no intercourse I’m afraid. In fact, I probably wouldn’t advise you have sex until after Baby is born.”

“Uh, I can guarantee you that will not happen,” Pete tells her, perhaps a little too earnestly, because she frowns slightly as though she doesn’t believe him – or she does, and that bothers her as well.

“Any sign of bleeding and you must get to the hospital immediately,” She carries on as she turns the machine back on. “If you’re lucky, you’ll make it to full term, but if not, you should still be safe if you make it through the next two months. By then your baby will be viable even if you have to deliver.”

To Patrick this feels surreal. He’s planned on having another five and a half months to go before he had to think about seeing an actual baby – the idea that he could be sitting with one in two – albeit in one of those terrifying premature baby wards – doesn’t quite seem possible. Then he’s craning his neck to see the image forming on the screen, the crown of his baby’s head showing, tiny nose and ears visible from the top. Pete is leaning in to see, pressed against Patrick from the other side for a closer look.

“Dude, you’re growing a _person_ ,” He says quietly.

Dr Whyte laughs.

“Do you want to know if your baby is a girl or a boy?” She asks.

“No,” Says Patrick at the exact moment that Pete exclaims “Yes,” breathily in the direction of the screen.

“No,” Pete rescinds, smiling awkwardly at the doctor.

“…Okay.” She moves the wand over to the other side of Patrick’s belly. “That might be just as well, since Baby isn’t being very cooperative.” Now all they can see are a pair of legs, crossed at the ankle, from toe to knee. “Let me just try and get a shot of Baby’s face for you to take home. Look here, you can see Baby’s heart.”

It’s small and dark, and looks like it’s moving up and down, fast, but Patrick thinks maybe slower than yesterday. He can see the arms, one held out in front of it and the other nearer where he can see its lower jaw. Then the image shifts and he can finally see his baby’s face from the side. It’s a strange picture; he can see the profile, but he can also see the baby’s vertebrae, its tiny ribcage and right through its head. Then it moves its hand, bringing the little fingers up to its mouth.

Dr Whyte presses PRINT. “Fifteen centimetres long, and the head is just under six centimetres diameter - that means Baby is about 240 grams - thats more than half a pound. There we are, that’s the health check completed. We ran some other tests on your blood, and everything seems fine. Did you want your baby tested for Down’s syndrome?”

“We’d still want it if it had Down’s syndrome,” Pete says indignantly, before promptly shutting up. He doesn’t look Patrick in the eye, but instead watches the screen as Dr Whyte focuses more on the placenta than the baby.

“Uh…” Patrick stammers.

“There’s no reason to believe your baby might have Down’s from the scan,” She assures him, “But even if you were keeping it anyway, it might be helpful to know.”

“No thanks.” He knows he should prepare but he’s mostly looking forward to five months of clinging to whatever blissful ignorance he has left, and every piece of information he hears is shattering his denial with the reality that is a human baby.

“Well, okay. The placenta is mostly intact and there doesn’t seem to be too much clotting, no more than yesterday, so I think you’ll be going home tomorrow morning. Here if you wipe down his tummy with this, I’ll fill out this paperwork and let the nursing team know you need to be ready to leave after your exam tomorrow morning.” She tears a length of blue tissue off of a roll and hands it to Pete.

He shares an alarmed look with Patrick but takes it. “Okay.”

It’s awkward. They can’t refuse, not if they want Pete to be allowed in the room – and as an unmarried couple, they’re lucky to get even that – so Pete does as she tells him, scrunching the tissue up in precisely the way Patrick wouldn’t if he were holding it (a neatly folded square would to the job so much better), and gently rubbing it over his stomach. Patrick flushes scarlet, but Pete refuses to hurry, moving as carefully as though Patrick might go into labour at the slightest jolt.

“Well, that’s that then!” Dr Whyte says cheerfully from behind them, ending their supervised moment. Patrick lets out a breath he’d been holding, and Pete throws the tissue in the direction of the trash and misses.

By the time he’s picked it up and thrown it away, she’s already gone.

The excitement seems to flow back into Pete then, and instead of giving Patrick his personal space back he’s inches away, bouncing on the balls of his feet as Patrick tries to push his gown down under the blankets without flashing him. “Patrick, it’s a _baby!_ ” He exclaims giddily. “Did you see it? It was perfect! It had all its bones and toes! I told you your one would be great, didn’t I tell you?”

He catches Patrick’s blank look and his face falls. “You – you are keeping it, right?”

Patrick shrugs. “Well, I didn’t get rid of it, so…”

“I mean, you’re keeping it once it’s born? You’re not, I dunno, giving it up, right?” Pete looks uncomfortable, hopeful, still bouncing up and down with uncontained energy.

“I’ve not thought much about it.” A lie. He’s thought about it loads, and as always he’s reached precisely no conclusions on what he should do.

“I’ll adopt it! If you don’t want it, I’ll take it instead.” Pete looks at him pleadingly, as though what they’re talking about is Patrick’s dessert or the runt of a litter of kittens.

“Pete! You can’t just – just _make_ these decisions like that!” Patrick huffs, struggling to sit further up in the bed.

“But I can. Please Patrick, I’m not even kidding, I know I want it, I knew when I saw it on the ultrasound thingy yesterday. I just know.” Pete is leaning so close to him that Patrick is having to sit back to get his eyes to focus on his face.

“Then… Why don’t _I_ know?” Patrick asks quietly. He feels sad and a little guilty that he can’t seem to drum up Pete’s enthusiasm for anything. All his nervous energy is being directed at, well, being nervous. Everything about what’s happened in the last few months terrifies him, and it’s only going to get worse.

“Patrick,” Pete places his hand on Patrick’s belly, rubbing it through the fabric. It’s not a very smooth motion; Patrick’s stomach is still sticky in places. It’s odd to have Pete touch him there, especially when he’d never been keen on anyone touching his bulging stomach even  _before_ it had good reason to be huge. “You were all worried when you thought you might lose it. I know you want it. You’re just scared is all.”

Patrick makes an uncertain sound in his throat, and Pete puts his other arm about his shoulders in an uncomfortable hug, still stroking Patrick’s belly which flutters uncomfortably. His smile brushes Patrick’s temple, reminding Patrick that his hair is greasy and gross and he hasn’t washed in two days. “Did you ever get me that soda?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah.” Pete slides back off the bed and onto the floor. "They only had Pepsi, sorry…”

The cold drink doesn’t seem to make the odd feeling in Patrick’s stomach go away. “I think that shitty hospital food is giving me indigestion.”

“Maybe it’s the baby moving,” Pete suggests. “I read somewhere that in your first pregnancy people sometimes mistake the early movements for gas.”

“You read somewhere?” Patrick asks him, taking a surprised gulp of his soda.

“Must’ve been some – I – I might’ve bought a book on it.” Pete confides, blushing slightly.

“On gas?” Patrick says, even though he knows that’s not the answer.

“On pregnancy.”

Patrick lets Pete’s face fall from hopeful to anxious before he says, “Me too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for this chapter:  
> Sexual assault in a medical context (vaginal exam given without consent); moderate psychological abuse in a medical context.


	8. Chapter 8

The next morning Patrick is ready to leave as soon as he sees the breakfast of watery eggs and toast, but although Pete arrives to pick him up at 11:30 with a bunch of Patrick’s clothes and his current favourite hat, he’s not actually released until 2pm, by which point he’s starving and just wants to be at home.

“Thanks for, you know…” _Dropping your life to take care of me_ is what he should say, but even now, admitting that he needs taking care of is not something he wants to do.

“Don’t mention it,” Pete smiles like he’s just giving Patrick a lift to the airport and combs one hand through his straightened hair until it hangs over the eye that Patrick can see from the passenger seat. Patrick looks at him in the mirror instead, and Pete avoids his gaze.

When he reaches Patrick’s street, Patrick reaches for the handle of the door. “You don’t have to park, I can just get out here.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Pete scoffs, pulling into the only free space and getting out before Patrick has time to argue. He hauls a huge duffel bag out of the trunk.

“What’s all that?” Patrick asks, opening his own door and trying to get out without moving his abdomen at all.

“Were you not there for all the parts where the hospital staff were like, _keep an eye on him and make sure he’s doesn’t do XZY_?” Pete slams the trunk closed. “I’m moving into your spare room.”

“Uh…” To call Patrick’s additional bedroom “spare” would be to ignore the fact that his instruments and vinyl take up a room by themselves. There’s definitely a bed in there, and if someone was determined enough, they could maybe even find it. “Fine, but I’m not helping with all the heavy lifting it’s gonna take to excavate the furniture.”

It’s weird to be back. His apartment is still a mess, albeit better than it’s been of late, and the baby book is open on the couch which Patrick can now slouch in to watch TV. He feels like he’s been gone for a very long time.

“What do you want to do with this?” Pete asks, holding up the scan.

Patrick shrugs uncomfortably, knowing he’s hardly displaying the kind of enthusiasm his baby deserves. “Stick it to the fridge or something.”

It isn’t that he doesn’t care, he justifies, it’s that he doesn’t have the energy to care. Physically he mostly feels just fine, but it hasn’t stopped him from wanting to crawl back into a bed where gawking nurses can’t watch him 24/7. His stomach is still fluttering sporadically, so he goes for his supply of antacids and crunches through a bag of optimistically titled _Tasty Rice Snacks_  while Pete swears at the trombone case that never seems to close in the spare room.

When his phone is finally charged enough to turn on, he has thirteen missed calls from his mother and four from Mark. As he deletes them, it continues to buzz with text after increasingly anxious texts from his mom.

_How r u doing?_

_Patrick I saw on the internet that there’s a rumour ur in hospital._

_Why aren’t u picking up?_

_Patrick I got a phone call from a magazine asking for a statement on your condition pick up your phone right now_

_Patrick the internet is saying you have cancer_

_I’m coming over._

_Where the fuck are you Patrick open the door and let me in!!!_

_Ur friends aren’t picking up either why will no1 communicate with me?_

Shit. As he’s about to open the last text, his phone begins ringing in his hands, _Mom_ flashing up on the screen.

“Uh, hi mom,” He greets, trying not to sound defensive.

“ _Patrick?!_ ” She shrieks back at him. “ _WHY THE HELL HAVEN’T YOU RETURNED MY CALLS?!_ ”

“I’m really sorry, I lost my phone…” He tries to make himself heard without alerting Pete to the conversation. He knows that lying is not the best plan of action, but telling her he’s pregnant seems like an even worse idea when she’s in this mood.

“ _If you lost your phone then why didn’t you pick up your house phone? Why didn’t your band pick up? I even tried Pete’s parents, but neither of them would talk to me! Have you any idea what kind of rumours have been going on about you? I thought something terrible had happened!_ ”

Patrick hold the phone away from his head as she shouts. “Jeez mom, calm down! The stress is bad for the b… Body.”

“ _The stress? The stress, Patrick? What about the stress of your son disappearing off the face of the planet? I came to your apartment! None of your neighbours had seen you in days! Where the hell were you?_ ”

Patrick puts the phone down, having yet to formulate a lie with his heart beating out of his chest..

“Did you tell her?” Pete asks from the doorway, making Patrick jump and drop his phone with a _thunk_ onto the floor.

“Not yet.” Patrick busies himself finding the TV remote.

“You’ve gotta tell her sometime,” Pete says, as though Patrick isn’t already painfully aware.

“Sometime,” Patrick agrees, meaning _not this time_.

He texts his mom a few minutes later, saying _sorry, no signal here_. He can feel Pete judging him from across the couch and looks for a change of subject. “Hey – I don’t remember dealing with any insurance stuff.”

“Taken care of,” Pete peels a pair of Patrick’s pyjama pants off the other couch cushion and brushes away a fragmented chip before sitting down. “As your _boyfriend_ they let me handle most of the paperwork.”

“Thanks,” Patrick looks away, once again feeling uncomfortable and dependent.

“What was he like?” Pete asks.

“Who?” Dr Richards comes to Patrick’s mind, but there’s no reason for Pete to ask that – he’d had a pretty good initial assessment of the man when he met him.

“The dad. Your boyfriend or whatever.”

“Oh,” Patrick blushes, thinking of his one missed call from Mark. “He was just some… Guy that I fucked.”

“That’s it? That’s all you know?” Pete’s face is unreadable. “You don’t know his name? What does he look like? Did you ever try to get in touch? You don’t know _anything_?”

“Well, I know what he _looked_ like,” Patrick says, tugging his hat down defensively, still not wanting to give Pete a name. “Vaguely,” He adds, not wanting to sound like the encounter had been too sober.

“Vaguely?” Pete is doing his best to not sound irritated and mostly failing. “Was he older, younger? Was he black, white, whatever? Was he tall? Did he have tattoo that said “Dad, heart disease, Mom, cancer?” Was he good looking?”

“Dude, I wasn’t going through some kind of eugenics checklist!” Patrick snaps. “He was darker than you and he didn’t have a tattoo of his medical history, is that good enough for you? What’s with the interrogation?”

“Are you serious?” Pete demands, face flushed and angry. The lines around his eyes have aged him a decade or so, and it only makes him look more pissed off.

“It’s not important! Stop making something out of nothing, Pete.” Patrick glares at him. “And stop making it sound like I’m some kind of slut!”

“Even sluts remember who the father of their child is, asshole!” Pete scoffs.

“It’s none of your fucking business!” Patrick yells, picking a cushion off the couch and lobbing it in the direction of Pete’s face. “So _just. Stop. Asking.”_

“Whatever. I’m going out.” Pete shoves the cushion aside and springs off the couch. “Try not to bleed to death while I’m gone.”

“I’ll do my best,” Patrick spits back at him, listening to Pete’s thumping footfalls until he slams the door behind him. “It’ll probably easier without the Spanish Inquisition here anyway!”

Patrick remains furious at Pete for about the time it takes for his heart to stop pounding, after which point he settles into a more leisurely resentment, quietly cussing out Pete for turning what should’ve been a relaxing first afternoon back into another row.

He checks his answerphone to find two hysterical messages from his mother, as expected, as well as two from Mark.

“ _Patrick, for fuck’s sake, pick up your fucking phone. You can’t just do this!_ "

“ _Hi, Patrick. I read online you were in hospital because of a seizure. I guess you’re finally taking care of it then? Call me when you get this. It’s Mark, by the way. You did the right thing. I – please just –_ “

Patrick thumbs at the red button to put the call down, but it seems to be stuck. In the end, he removes the battery and throws it, the cover for the battery and phone in three different direction in what he fully admits is a grown-up temper tantrum.

“Go fuck yourself!” He shouts at Mark via his disconnected phone, which has skittered under the coffee table.

He lies back on the couch and stares angrily at a mark on the ceiling until he can again breathe properly. His stomach gurgles uncomfortably.

“Not you as well,” Patrick groans at his belly. It bubbles back at him, probably passive aggressively or something.

He means to do his laundry and clear up and generally make Pete’s help redundant, but in the end he spends two hours sulking in front of the TV. The closest he gets to productive is finishing a carton of milk that (he hopes) is just this side of turning off. His landline rings, several times, and after the second irritated call from his mother who has a monologue about his irresponsibility it apparently takes several messages worth of time to deliver, he mutes that as well, until all that’s left is the blissful radio-silence and seven straight episodes of Buffy.

He’s dozing off to sleep to a commercial about dryer sheets when the buzzer sounds, twice and urgently.  Patrick drags himself off the couch and steps on the battery casing to his cell, cracking it and hurting his foot, and only finally reaching the door in time to hear someone struggling with the lock before Pete crashes through it.

Patrick has nothing to say. Pete is sweating and panting, looking as though he’s just run a mile.

“Has something happened?” He asks, at the exact same moment as Pete says, “You’re okay!”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Dude!” Pete gestures at all of Patrick, eyes bulging slightly. “I texted you to say sorry, and when you didn’t reply, I texted you again. And then I called, to see if you’d talk to me, and your cell didn’t ring, so I called your house phone and it rang and you still didn’t pick up, and I thought you were like, in trouble, so I came back.”

Patrick laughs, a little hysterically. “Holy -- From now on, anyone wanting to contact me has to do it by post and give me seven working days to reply. Jesus, Pete, I don’t need a baby sitter breathing down my neck.”

He turns back towards the living room, leaving it up to Pete whether he stays or goes, but Pete stays stood just inside his front door. “Don’t be such a dick, Trick. You just came back from the hospital.”

“And I’m _fine_ aren’t I?” Patrick stops in the hallway.

“No you’re not fucking _fine_. I took you to hospital in an ambulance a few days ago when you were bleeding and passed out! Maybe if it was the other way around and _you’d_ seen _me_ crying and bleeding in – in fucking stirrups – in some ER somewhere, you’d take it a little more seriously, or at least I hope so.”

Patrick feels a reply biting at his lips, and only holds it in to wonder if he’s always been this passive aggressive.

“Jesus, I’m just trying to say I was worried about you.”

The silence is caused by both of them holding their tongues and not at all because there’s nothing to say. Patrick isn’t looking at Pete, but he can feel the nervous energy, the accusations and questions. _When did you become such a dick?_

Looking back at him is worse, because Pete’s pained expression isn’t even exasperated. It just reads, _you used to be the nicest person I knew_. He can see the words on his face, written in sleepless lines and wrinkles. Patrick doesn’t know how to apologise without making it seem like Pete was right to worry.

Pete sighs heavily, and Patrick reigns his in.

“Sorry I said you weren’t taking it seriously. I know you were scared, I can’t imagine being able to just cope if I was the one who’d been bleeding like that,” Pete says with another sigh and a shake of his head, which is the worst thing of all because he’s forcing it, making the conversation happen and Patrick isn’t ready for any of it. He’s happy to save it up for a conversation with a therapist in four years time. Maybe longer.

But it’s too true and honest for him to call out, and Pete’s being too grown up for him to brush the apology aside. “I know I’m really difficult right now. You don’t have to stay here, I’ll be fine. I’ll turn my phone on, and…”

Pete shakes his head. “Dude. I’ve put up with you for years and you think I’m just gonna leave when you finally have something that justifies being that much of a bitch?”

Patrick smiles despite himself, small and not very happy, but his chest feels lighter.

They linger in the hallway, not saying anything.

“I guess I should call the label,” Patrick says at last, when there doesn’t seem to be anything else to talk about.

“Already done it,” Pete smiles humourlessly.

“How did it go?” Patrick leans against the door frame to the living room.

“There’s – there’s a rumour. Someone saw you in hospital and there’s all these websites saying you have cancer or whatever. So, I just kind of… Said it wasn’t cancer but you were sick and they’d just have to wait,” Pete’s grin turns apologetic and Patrick can’t blame him for expecting a bad response.

It’s a logical thing to have done, though. It’s probably what he’d’ve done in Pete’s place. “Won’t they want proof?”

Pete shrugs. “Yeah, but like, it just has to be a letter from the doctor saying you’re sick, not _what_ you’re sick with. And since they told you to rest and shit, I’m sure that counts as ill enough to not be on tour or recording eleven hours a day or whatever.”

“It’s gonna mess everything up for us though. Our fans’ll have to wait ages, they’ll stop liking our stuff… I’m screwing up all our timing and our dates,” Patrick finally turns into the main room, trusting Pete to follow him through.

“They won’t. Plenty of bands have ages between albums. We can just release a single to bridge the gap,” Pete trails after him.

Patrick makes a soft noise of surprise.

“What is it?”

“I dunno – I think it was a kick,” Patrick pauses, placing his hand on his stomach. It still feels like bubbling, but it's also a definite movement of some sort. “It’s like, I dunno, it feels like popcorn popping or something. Come feel.”

Pete's hands are already there, fingers itching to replace Patrick’s as he peels them away.

“Right now – did you feel that?” Patrick asks, pulling his shirt from between Pete’s hand and his skin. “And again.”

“Uh,” Pete laughs, his ears pinking. “I think this is one of those things you’re only feeling with your hand because you can feel it on the inside.”

Patrick flushes, stepping back from Pete’s touch. “Oops, sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

After a moment of mortified silence, Patrick’s belly rumbles for real. “Food.”

“Yeah,” Pete replies, so they do.

 

 

The doorbell wakes Patrick from a slumber on the couch, even though it’s only half eight in the evening. Pete is nowhere to be seen, but he must be around, because Patrick hears shuffling, and eventually he emerges from the spare room, a capo rolling out behind him onto the floor.

“I’ve got it,” Pete tells him, which is a good thing since Patrick had kind of forgotten that he was meant to open the door when the bell rang.

“Oh yeah,” Patrick sits up groggily, wiping sleep from his eyes. He tries to get up from the sofa as the sound of Joe greeting Pete drifts through.

“Hey man,” Joe is grinning at him by the time Patrick is fully upright and pushing a takeout container away with his foot.

“Uh, hi,” Patrick says awkwardly.

“Don’t do that ‘uh hi’ with me bro,” Joe tugs him into a hug that manages to avoid any contact with Patrick’s front whatsoever. “Dude, I thought you were gonna like, die or something. I always thought Pete would be the first to go, you know, I thought he’d pull some stupid prank and like, get crushed by an amp or whatever.”

“Yeah, if you don’t crack your skull stage-diving first!” Pete retorts from the hallway.

“Hey,” Andy appears meekly at the threshold. “How’re you feeling?”

"Alright. A bit tired, but I think it's psychological." Patrick lets himself be pushed back down onto the couch by Joe. Andy sits down next to him, squashing himself into too small a space.

Joe flops down next to them, spreading his legs and taking up at least half the sofa. "I bought you a present," he says, holding up a bag in front of Patrick's face. "Well. I bought your foetus a present."

"Thanks..." Patrick takes the bag and pulls out a hardback children's book which seems to be about an umbrella. "It says two years and up," He says, a little horrified, as if Joe were offering a box set of Saw movies to his unborn child. "It's only... Minus like, five months."

"It's good for you to read to it while it's still living in you," Joe brushes his complaint aside. "Pete's mom says she read the whole of Les Mis to Petus while he was still a foetus."

"That explains a lot," Andy says quietly in Patrick's ear.

"You spoke to Pete's mom?" Patrick asks, suddenly jittery and anxious.

"Well, we kind of had to..." Joe says slowly. Pete keeps his mouth shut, obviously fearful of further onslaughts. "You basically bled all over her chair until you got taken off in an ambulance from her front lawn, so..."

Pete starts to try to defend them but Patrick cuts him off with a groan. "God, I can't believe your mom knows before mine. She's going to _kill_ me."

Joe gives him a look portraying the internal struggle between _you haven't told your mom yet?!_ And _she_ probably _won't_ kill _you_.

 _"_ She will though," Patrick says in answer to his unvoiced response.

"No she won't," Pete rolls his eyes. "Not unless you leave it even longer. If she finds out in the third semester she really will kill you."

"It's trimester," Patrick mutters, already consumed with hypothetical horror.

"You can't hide a toddler from your mom dude," Joe tells him as though it's another piece of the weed-fuelled advice he gives out on a daily basis. "What're you gonna do, not tell her till you invite her to the christening?"

"I don't think we'll have a christening," Patrick says distractedly.

"Well, that's that problem solved then!" Joe ruffles his hair with one of his great, bony hands.

"Fucking stop it!" Patrick gives him a shove.

"Yeah Joe," Patrick thinks Andy is going to take his side until he says, "If the kid wants to see its grandma it can contact her itself when it turns eighteen."

To his credit, Pete doesn't join in; he just continues hovering a few feet away and looking tired.

Patrick lets his head fall back, landing on Andy's arm because there's no way for Andy to get out of the way. "You guys are so unhelpful."

The pair carry on gently ribbing him for most of the evening, breaking mostly to laugh themselves to near vomiting (almost literally in Patrick's case), when Joe gives them a dramatic reading of the picture book (" _Come on guys, this is serious. This is for the baby, not for you."_ ).

 

It's not that weird having Pete stay. They've lived together before and they're used to touring together, to treading on each other's things and smelling each other when they're overdue a shower. It's a little odd for the rest of the guys not to be there, but they meet up often enough, increasingly at Patrick’s since he doesn’t go out a lot.

The one time he does go out, it’s definitely a mistake, as far as Patrick is concerned. They pick Hemingway up from Pete’s parents' because there’s not been time to see him and Patrick’s apartment isn’t really dog friendly, and amble down the avenues to the little square that dares to call itself Perkin’s Woods. Patrick is struck by how green the burbs are, how pretty the light is through the trees, wandering along with his head upturned towards the glimpses of blue sky whilst Pete and Hemmy tear about after an increasingly slobbery stick, when he walks right into some twelve year old kid.

“When’s it due, fatass?” Someone’s rude little brat asks him.

Patrick blinks and hurries off towards Pete, hating how his face flushes, how it makes him look fatter and even less fit, and – “Pete, people can _see_.”

Pete has picked up Hemmy and is waiting for Patrick to catch up. He squints at Patrick, as though the sun is in his face, but it isn’t. “He probably just…” Pete trails off, obviously realising that _he probably just meant you were fat_ is hardly the comfort Patrick is looking for. Patrick feels his ears burning and watches Hemingway struggle ineffectively to be put down.

They walk a little way longer, coming out on the side of the school and then heading back in the direction of Pete’s house.

“D’you wanna go get dinner?” Pete asks hopefully as they near the front yard, obviously not wanting to leave his dog so soon.

“No,” Says Patrick, because he might be hungry, but now he feels fat and on display.

The white swing chair on the immaculate front lawn is missing its cushion.

“Shit. I should probably buy your parents a new seat cover thing,” Patrick gestures towards it.

“Trohman already tried to do that,” Pete tells him. “But my mom ordered one the day after and it’s meant to arrive tomorrow.”

Patrick doesn’t comment on the fact that Joe feels obliged to replace something Patrick had damaged, and tries to communicate his lack of desire to interact with Dale, who opens the door before Pete can unlock it, in the politest way possible.

He must be too polite, though, because he accidentally accepts her invitation for dinner instead of backing out.

It’s difficult to tell how much Pete’s dad knows, but Patrick suspects he didn’t miss the ambulance arriving at his house a little over a week ago, or at the very least has noticed that his son seems to have moved back out, albeit leaving behind his dog and most of his stuff.

Either way, the conversation mostly stays clear of Patrick’s hospitalisation and growing foetus problem, except for repeated well-wishes and an odd look Pete’s mom keeps giving Pete, as though she’s proud of him for something.  Feeling shitty from earlier, Patrick would happily have stuck to bread and water, but Pete’s mom cooks some kind of pasta sauce especially for him, since he can’t eat carbonara, so he has to make an honest attempt at cleaning his plate.

When he tells her it’s fine, he can just eat what the rest of them are having, she shakes her head and says, “Raw egg, sweetie.”

So clearly everyone knows. And apparently he can't eat nice things, like carbonara and cake batter and food that's been on the floor. 

Pete plays around with Hemingway for a while after dinner, sitting with him on the living room floor with his toys and a hot dog outfit he point blank refuses to wear, and Patrick potters around as unobtrusively as he can, considering a trip to the basement to play one of Pete’s guitars. He decides he will, and leaves the living room to go there when he spots a letter open on a side table with the Saint Francis Hospital flower logo on it. Without really meaning to, he scans the addressee’s name and the subject line, INVOICE.

St Francis is one of Pete’s local hospitals, so that’s nothing too suspicious. But why would they be billing Pete and not his insurance? Mission for the basement aborted, Patrick picks it up and skims the list of charges until he sees the totals.

 

**Total…………………………………………..$12884.47**

Insurance Adjustments…………………$3540.09

Insurance Balance Due………………….$4033.14

**Estimated Patient Balance Due…...$7311.24**

 

By the time he reaches the bottom of the page, he’s hardly surprised when the box containing the patient’s name and address gives _his_ name and address.

“Pete. What the _actual fuck_ is this?” He yells, not even bothering to shout it in the direction of Pete.

Hemmy makes a growling woof of apprehension, and Pete’s dad pokes his head round a doorway to look surprised at him.

“Oh shit,” Pete responds after a minute, sounding surprised, like Patrick’s disdain has only just reached him.

 

Patrick isn’t angry. Well. Not that angry. He’s pretty angry.  
But mostly he’s just scared and also kind of confused.

He’s slumped on one of Pete’s parent’s uglier couches, trying not to pull his own hair out, and Pete is sitting on the floor with the dog, because he has evidently surpassed his quota for adult behaviour for the week.

“Why didn’t you _tell_ me?” Patrick asks. “How come this got sent to you instead of me? Why hasn’t my insurance paid? I have the card in my wallet…”

“Well, as your boyfriend, they just kinda… Let me,” Pete tells Hemingway.

“We’re not _married_! What difference does that make?” Patrick shakes the letter as though it might say something else when threatened.

“I’m the next of kin listed on your form, and I told them you were too vulnerable to deal with it yourself?” Pete shrugs apologetically. “No one really questioned it.”

“Too vulnerable?!” Patrick does a decent imitation of Hemmy’s growl, paper crunching in his hand.

“Patrick!” Pete hisses like an embarrassed parent in a public place. “For god’s sake Patrick, you were out cold when we arrived! You were fucking crying – no, don’t deny it! What would you have done if you’d found out your insurance wasn’t going to cover half the stuff?”

“I’d’ve freaking gotten rid of it, that’s what!” Patrick barks back, fully aware that he’s having another tantrum but totally unable to stop it. “Seven thousand goddamn dollars! And that’s not even for the birth!”

“You don’t have to worry about the money!” Pete flaps his hands in an apparent attempt to physically cool Patrick’s rage. “We’ll _manage_. You can’t get rid of a baby you want because of _money_!”

“I can too!” Patrick shoots back without missing a beat. “It would’ve been my choice! And now it’s _yours_! You’re the one who wants me to have it, Pete, and now you’re telling me my insurance _won’t even cover it_?!”

“They’ll cover some stuff! In the beginning they declined, and the hospital tried to charge it all to you, but I got dad to come in and he argued until they agreed to charge all the stuff that wasn’t explicitly… Female, to your insurance and it went through!”

“So they’re not covering it because it’s too ‘ _female_ ’?” Patrick shouts. Hemmy takes his chance and runs for it, skittering over the floorboards out in the hallway.

Pete cowers slightly, cross-legged on the floor. “It’s not _my_ fault! You’re listed as male on their system so they’re using it as an excuse to not pay.”

Patrick lets out an irritated sigh, and then a few seconds later, a sad one. “I’m going home. I just want to go to bed.”

“Okay,” Pete says, just as sadly, and follows him as he storms half-heartedly out the door.


	9. Chapter 9

Patrick was meant to go and see his doctor five days after leaving the hospital, but it’s actually ten by the time he gets there. Pete reminds him repeatedly throughout the morning that he needs a letter to appease the label, until Patrick storms out of the apartment and goes early to the appointment, meaning he has to wait an entire hour to see Dr Muller because the surgery is running late. It’s hot out, too hot for cardigans, but Patrick wears a hoody of Andy’s anyway, and perches on the uncomfortable chair closest to the air conditioning unit with his hat pulled down as low as it will go. He deliberately does not think about the appointment. He hasn’t felt the bubbling sensation in several days, and he’s still spotting when he goes to pee, which is about once an hour.

Eventually his name gets called, and he shuffles through to the office, plucking anxiously at the sweater when it seems stuck to his belly.

“Hello,” says Dr Muller, smiling stiffly. “How are things going?”

“Alright,” Patrick replies, sitting down in his usual seat. "Mostly."

“No more bleeding?” Dr Muller rifles through Patrick’s handwritten notes from the hospital.

“Uh, a little bit?”

“Perfectly normal,” Dr Muller smiles again, even more tightly than before.

"Is something up?" Patrick asks.

Dr Muller places both elbows on top of the desk, suddenly business-like. “Can I be frank?”

“Sure,” Says Patrick, because it’s hardly the kind of thing he can says _no_ to.

“I really thought you were going to get it terminated,” Dr Muller tells him flatly.

The disapproval in his voice instantly makes Patrick feel sick. It’s how he imagines a smoker might feel having failed to give up the habit in advance of some kind of operation. He wants to shrink out of sight, but there’s nowhere to go and all of Dr Muller’s attention is focussed solely on him. He pulls his hat down instead.

“I’m very concerned at your decision, and I really don’t understand _why_ you’ve not gotten an abortion. Is it a religious concern?” Dr Muller continues when Patrick fails to reply.

Patrick shakes his head, staring at his lap like a chastised child.

“The testosterone in your body could be very damaging to the foetus. If the foetus is female, it could cause the genitals to develop into something resembling a penis, or a cross between the two. There’s some evidence it could cause autism.”

“I can live with those things,” Patrick murmurs, still not looking up. 

Dr Muller gives a cynical pause, but decides not to argue the point. _It's irresponsible!_  hangs in the air. “When was your most recent injection?”

Patrick shifts uncomfortably in his seat. He can feel the doubt radiating of Dr Muller in waves. “A while ago.”

“What’s a while?” Dr Muller asks again, tersely.

“About two years.”

There’s a longer pause this time. Someone is arguing with the receptionist outside.

“I was always concerned you would regret it,” Dr Muller rubs his eyelids, looking every one of his sixty-something years. “You were too young.”

“What? I don’t _regret_ anything,” Patrick insists, deeply regretting having come to his doctor’s appointment.

“Then why are you _pregnant_? Why have you stopped taking your hormones?”

“They were making my hair fall out!” Patrick counters.

“If you were really transsexual,” Dr Muller ignores Patrick’s protestations, “You would be _horrified_ at the idea of getting pregnant. We wouldn’t even be having this discussion, because you would’ve been on your medication, and _you would not have gotten pregnant in the first place_.”

“Why?” Patrick grits out, voice low and shaking.

Dr Muller shakes his head. “That’s just how it is.”

Patrick leaves before he can overturn the desk, heart pounding furiously. He marches past the receptionist and the elderly man hollering at her without a second glance and out of the door before he has a chance to calm down.

 

When he boots open his front door, no one is home, and there’s no reason not to go straight to bed so he does.

He wakes hours later to Pete sitting on it, prodding his shoulder through the comforter. “Trick? Did it go okay?”

Patrick shakes his head, face planted firmly into his pillow.

“What happened? Is… Are you alright? Patrick?” Pete tries to roll him over, but Patrick resists.

“I’m fine,” Patrick forces himself to say so as not to leave him hanging.

“Then what’s up?” Pete continues to paw at his shoulder until Patrick rolls over.

Patrick grunts something that was never meant to be intelligible, staring hard at the shoddy paintwork on the ceiling. “He was angry that I kept it.”

Pete touches Patrick’s stomach through his t-shirt, just for a second, and then takes his hand away as though it was an accident. Patrick sits up in the bed to cover his embarrassment.

“I didn’t get the letter and I can’t go back,” Patrick half grumbles, half pleads.

“You don’t have to. We’ll find you another doctor,” Pete promises. “Shit, he was the one who directed us to the hospital, I thought…”

Which is all it really takes to push Patrick over the edge into despair. “What if no one will treat me? What if the record label cancels our contract because I can’t get evidence? Or what if they make us play and I’m like this and everyone sees?” He chokes, gesturing wildly at nothing in particular.

“Dude!” Pete cuts him off, shaking him by the shoulder. “None of that’s gonna happen. We’ll find a doctor who’s decent, even if we have to go out of state.”

“Oh my God, this is such a mess! This is gonna ruin our careers, it’s such a big mistake, what the hell have I done? I can’t go _shopping_ around for a new doctor, I could barely even cope with seeing the same one for ten years, I'm a complete fuck-up.” Patrick covers his face in his hands.

Pete says nothing for a minute, shifting and repositioning himself cross-legged on the bed. His hand twitches, gripping a phantom pen for a second before relaxing, over and over again like a newly developed anxious tick.

Patrick just groans, horrified that he’s let himself get this far. “I can’t become a parent, Pete. I’m not _ready_. I don’t want to do this any more.”

"You don't... You don't _have_ to..." Pete's voice is weak; it sounds like Patrick feels. "I mean, It's your body."

"It's not about my _body_ ," Patrick says, even though it is. "It's... I'm too young. I never meant to have a kid before I was like, thirty, I never meant to _carry_ the kid. I can't be a parent. I can't deal with this, with - everyone else."

"It's not too late to get rid of it," Pete murmurs, and Patrick can see on his face that it pains him to say it.

"You don't want me to, though, do you?"

"It's not - it's not about - I," Pete rings his hands and starts again. The whites of his eyes are red with tiredness. Patrick wonders how he's been sleeping, if he's been sleeping at all in the spare room, with its looming instruments and not enough space. "The last thing I want is to pressure you into doing this. The absolute last thing, Patrick."

"I know," Patrick looks away, unable to withstand the intensity of the moment. "But that doesn't mean you don't want it."

"No, but... Patrick, you're my best friend." Pete tips forward until his forehead bumps Patrick's shoulder, and Patrick doesn't look down at him.

"What - what if I had it, but I didn't want to raise it. What would you - would you still want to..?"

Pete sits back up to look at him, trying not to sink into the dip they've created in the mattress. "Only if you'd still be my best friend."

The words are so quiet and unhappy, and the sadness of the idea seeps into Patrick like drops of rain hitting a dry rock, tears blotting onto the surface of his mind until he's completely saturated with melancholy. He doesn't cry often, finds it hard to cry in front of people, but the sobs rip through him like silent, violent hiccups, shaking his body up into a quivering mess of despair and hopelessness. The bed creeks as Pete leans towards him. Patrick lets himself fall until his head is buried in Pete's shoulder, and Pete's arms fold across his back.

"I feel like such a shitty person," Patrick chokes. "Anyone else would be choosing baby names and buying cribs and I can't make myself do any of it. I can't bear to even think about it... What kind of parent can't bear to think about their own child?"

"You're not bad," Pete tells his hat, sounding thoroughly miserable himself. "It's just really hard, Patrick."

He starts to speak again several times and stops himself, rubbing Patrick's back instead and rocking them both awkwardly, facing each other.

"For years all I wanted was for people to see me as a guy, and they finally did. Even my grandparents and my dad, and _you_ and everyone I knew. If you'd told me I was going to throw that all out for a baby I wasn't sure I even wanted, I'd've cut my womb out there and then!" The anger is hopeless and undirected and it's also exhausting. Patrick just wants to sleep. For a long time. Indefinitely. Or, he's beginning to think, he just needs to wake up from this stupid, hideous nightmare.

"I still see you as a dude..." The frown in Pete's voice is audible, almost a little confused, but it changes nothing. 

"But not everyone does. They don't even see me as a woman either, just a _thing_ that shouldn't exist."

"Who?"

Patrick's back is starting to ache, so he pulls out of the hug and lays back down on the bed. "Dr Muller. The first doctor at the hospital. The entire first hospital. Mark."

"Mark who?" Pete asks immediately, and damned if Patrick didn't walk right into that one.

"Mark who you don't know," He sighs. "The father."

Pete lies down, ostensibly to be next to him, but really, Patrick suspects, so that he doesn't have to look him in the face. "You remembered his name then."

Patrick bites his lip, guilt suddenly overtaking the despair in his heart. "I was with him for eight months. So, yeah, I remember his name."

"Eight months?"

"Come on. You knew I was lying when I said it was a one night stand."

"I didn't, actually. I just figured your exciting sex life was something else you never told me about. Joe was the one who pointed out that you probably couldn't go around having casual sex with people, but..." Pete trails off, pursing his lips.

Patrick glances guiltily at him, but can't make eye contact. "Sorry..."

Pete sits up. 

"Where are you going?" Patrick asks urgently, scrambling up to follow him. "Pete, please, I... Please don't go anywhere."

"I'm not," Pete doesn't look back at him. "It's late, Patrick. I'm going to bed."

To say that Patrick has never cried himself to sleep over Pete before would be lying, but he does it again anyway, heartsick for lack of Pete's forgiveness and the knowledge that he doesn't even really deserve it.

 

 

It’s a full week later when Patrick gets to see a doctor again. It’s back at the Saint Francis, and the doctor is Dr Whyte, arranged by Pete, or, Patrick suspects, Pete’s dad, who is not the kind of man people argue back to on the phone.

He twists himself into knots about the appointment, telling Pete he’ll take the bus and then regretting it. The appointment is fine. Dr Whyte asks only the most relevant questions; Dr Richards isn’t there; nothing has ruptured or burst and there’s no clot on the ultrasound. She gives him another photo to go with his $400 invoice, which he takes with him to Joe’s where Andy is staying.

“Look, I had a check-up today and they did another scan,” Patrick holds it out for them to see.

“Wow!” Joe exclaims, holding the photo up to the light as though it’s an x-ray. “It’s like a skinny baby in a skeleton suit.”

“How much did you smoke?” Patrick asks, taking the picture back and giving it to Andy to look thoughtfully over.

“What’s the scale?” Andy asks.

“Well, head to toe, it’s about ten and a half inches, and uh, ‘crown to rump’, nearly seven,” Patrick recalls. “She said it weighs about twelve and a half ounces.”

"In a week or two, you'll have piled on a whole pound," Andy laughs quietly at his own joke.

"I think I had that covered around week three, actually," Patrick remarks dryly. The way that Andy and Joe are pawing over the photo makes him wish Pete had been there to see the scan. It would've been important to him, he thinks. "When is Pete getting here?"

"He said four and it's 4:30 now so I guess he'll be here by five," Joe says offhandedly. "I'll get us some food and shit."

Patrick sits on Joe's couch and waits for Pete to arrive. Joe's guitar is _right there_ and Patrick should be messing around on it or something, should have done the music for at least the chorus to Pete's new _arm's race_ lyrics, but he hasn't got anything. He's not even sure he wants to play; he just wants to lie down and forget the minor ordeal that was his afternoon.

His stomach decides to distract him by fluttering repeatedly; he puts his hand over it, but he can't feel the movement from the outside. He wonders if it isn't just gas.

"You alright man?" Andy murmurs by his ear, making him jump. "You don't seem so good."

Patrick nods and smiles, but the concern on Andy's face makes it clear that it was a poor attempt. "Just kinda stressed. I'll be fine."

Andy sinks into Joe's couch next to him, wrinkling his nose at the smell of weed emanating from its fibres. "What's stressing you?"

Patrick shrugs, because isn't it obvious? But Andy is obviously not taking silence for an answer, so he says, "Well. There's the whole pregnant thing for a start. And the idea that the media could find out. It's disrupting our schedule, having a kid is gonna disrupt all our schedules forever..."

He trails off as Joe returns bearing coke and chips and some kind of green, organic-looking sludge that must be a smoothie for Andy.

Andy picks up his cup and tips it; it takes a moment for the liquid to yield to gravity. "You don't sound very excited."

Patrick winces and shrugs. "It's not feeling like much to be excited about."

"It'll be cool," Andy tries to reassure him. "Loads of bands have a kid with them. Like a little mascot."

"Yeah, until the media realises I'm the  _mother_ ," Patrick snorts derisively. "Not when the bills for the birth come in and bankrupt me, and I'm left with some kid to raise before I'm twenty-five."

"Then... Why are you doing this to yourself? Dude it's making you miserable," Joe says, almost as softly as Andy would.

Patrick shrugs it of; or rather, he tries to shrug it off, physically shrugs and shakes his head, and then bursts into tears.

Joe and Andy both jump at the sound of Patrick's first sob as though they've heard a gunshot. They've seen Patrick in _angry_ tears, they've seen him tantrum before, but this is new and apparently unexpected.

"Fuck!" Joe mutters in surprise.

Andy stares at him before patting him awkwardly on the back.

"I'm don't _know_ why I'm doing this!" Patrick practically yells, directing his anger at having embarrassed himself by crying yet again at the rest of the world instead. "I don't know what to do, and now it's too late."

"It's not too late," Joe is still standing there, tray in hand. "You still have a couple weeks to get rid of it, if you want to."

Patrick wipes his eyes on his t-shirt. "But I can't make that decision. I've left it too long and I _can't_."

"There's always adoption," Andy reminds him gently.

Patrick can't respond to that, because he actually _knows_ why that one can't happen - Pete wants him to keep it too badly, and he can't hold the child under Pete's nose and make him watch as Patrick gives it up to someone else. He loves Pete too much to even consider it. “I should go home, I… Sorry.”

Joe slides into the space between Patrick and the arm of the couch, squashing him aside, and hugs him. “You don’t have to be sorry.”

Patrick would quite like it if the couch could swallow him, or at least release enough smoke from its clutches to get him high enough to not care, but neither happens and he’s forced to accept awkward comforting because he simply doesn’t have the energy to move; when the doorbell rings and Joe gets up to answer it, he sags limply into the empty space, letting his head fall to the couch cushions.

“Patrick, what’s up?” Pete asks from somewhere above him.

“He just… Started crying,” Says Joe, still bewildered.

“I don’t feel so good,” Patrick stares at the couch and picks at a feather poking out from its fabric. It feels like the understatement of the century.

“Do you want to go home?”

“Yeah.”

 

The guilt of missing practice – again – eats Patrick for the entire drive back, which is mercifully short. They were meant to be recording _next week_ , but the note from Dr Whyte has had it pushed back indefinitely, which is a good thing since they have a total of five songs they could potentially record, and three of those Patrick would not be happy with if he had the capacity to be happy about anything at all right now.

“What’s wrong, Patrick?” Pete asks as they get through the front door.

Patrick shrugs. “I haven’t even told my mom.”

Pete sighs. He has a lot of lines around his eyes, and though his hair is still straight, it’s clearly not been washed or combed since at least yesterday. “Things are gonna work out okay, Trick.”

“Yeah,” Says Patrick, not really believing it. “It’s the hormones. They’ve just thrown me off completely, you know?”

“I never knew pregnancy would suck this bad,” Pete frowns sympathetically.

Patrick looks away, rubbing at his irritated eyelids until he can see stars. “It does.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings at the end of the chapter.

Patrick’s mom is brisk with him on the phone for several weeks, and doesn’t ask him to visit. This is fine by him, because during this period his belly goes from “beer gut” to something more like “swallowed a beach ball”; it’s rounder and shinier, and if sleeping on his front was out before, he can’t even lie vaguely flat that way now.

For most of what at Dr Whyte’s latest estimate counts as week 22, Patrick is fine, but in week 23 he descends into utter terror, up most of the night every night, fretting about his impending deadline.

“Fucking hell, Trick!” Pete jumps when he finds Patrick awake in the kitchen at 5am for the second night in a row.

“I can’t sleep,” Patrick tells him, even though he can barely keep his eyes open. The fear is so real it keeps his heart pounding and his hands sweating, like he’s in the kind of danger that might finish him any second. It's the kind of panic he felt the first time they played a really big venue, that step up between an audience of 150 and 2500 that had made him, Joe and Pete all physically sick. He’s stirring carrot soup in endless circles with shaking hands, not so hungry now that he actually has something to eat.

Pete pulls the bowl from his hands and places it on the table with a soft _thunk_ , but he doesn’t say anything.

“If I don’t do it tomorrow,” Patrick tastes stomach acid and stops to wait for his throat to open.

“I know.” Pete pours a glass of water and hands it to Patrick, and Patrick drinks it simply because it seems like the obvious thing to do. “Are you thinking about it?”

Patrick shrugs. He hadn’t been, not seriously, but the knowledge that if he doesn’t do it _now_ then he _can’t_ is terrifying. “A little bit.”

Pete pulls out the chair across from him with a scrape and sits down.

Patrick’s stomach flutters, and then someone kicks his bladder from the inside, determined to let him know they’re there. “The baby’s kicking,” He tells Pete. His voice is recked, but it’s just a statement, an easy thing to say.

There’s an odd pause as they both accept that Patrick isn’t going to get rid of it, tomorrow or at all.

“Can I see if I can feel?” Pete asks once it’s passed.

“Yeah,” Patrick stands up to make sure he can reach, and Pete does too. He takes the hand Pete offers and shoves the waistband of his pyjama pants a little lower, out of the way. “Just here.”

It’s firmer than popcorn popping now, like someone’s flicking him with a finger. Pete’s palms are cold and sweaty, so low on his belly that his fingers are touching Patrick’s pubic hair.

“Just then?” Pete whispers, like his voice might stop the movement. It won’t; Patrick’s tried talking it out of punching him in the cervix before.

“Yeah.”

“Hello, Baby. You been keeping your daddy up, huh?” Pete murmurs, fingers pressing back into Patrick’s stomach to meet the movements. Patrick can’t tell if Pete is talking about himself or Patrick when he says daddy. It makes a little shiver go through him, the thought of Pete saying those words to an actual baby, the kind of baby that exists on the outside of Patrick’s body, who kicks air instead of flesh and has grabby little hands and makes noises back.

Pete’s eyes are round with wonder despite their tiredness, his voice hoarse with what can only be described as awe, and Patrick, Patrick is so grateful that he wants to kiss him.

He blinks at the realisation, but the desire is so strong it sends a little shudder up his spine. He can feel Pete’s breath on his cheek, and they’re close enough that the fullest point of Patrick’s belly is almost touching Pete’s. He appeases himself by letting his head fall forward onto Pete’s shoulder and kissing his collar bone through his t-shirt instead.

Pete makes a little noise of surprise, because kissing friends is something _he_ does, not Patrick, and even then it’s almost always on stage. “Well hello there, Pattycakes,” he chuckles, putting the arm that isn't still stroking Patrick's stomach around his waist.

“Don’t call me that,” Patrick grumbles, tucking his head under Pete’s chin. He’s so tired he’s barely standing.

“Aww, you’re no fun. Your daddy’s no fun, Baby,” Pete complains, ending the mystery of who _daddy_ was. “Come on, Patrick. Let’s go to bed.”

Patrick forgets for just a second that they’re going to separate beds. He’s just overtired, and Pete is confusing him.

 

Pete isn't in the next morning, but Patrick wakes up late - well into the afternoon - so it's not really much of a surprise.

Waking up late is a blessing of its own accord, because the knowledge that it's probably too late to find someone to give him a surgical abortion after four pm on a Sunday allows him to think of other things.

Patrick makes it through the evening feeling less hopeless than usual and manages to compose the first verse of Pete's _Arms Race_ song and tweek the lyrics a little too. It's the first day in a while that hasn't added up to a total of nothing productive achieved, and he emails the file to Joe, Andy, and wherever Pete has gone off to, feeling relieved.

A buzz at the door gets him off the bed in his music room - now full of Pete's things - and he reaches the door half expecting to see Joe or Andy standing outside with instruments ready to play - only to be faced with his mother instead.

"Hello, sweetie," She smiles when she sees him and launches into an apology for her having avoided him for the past three and a half weeks, which he can't hear over his own paralysing panic. "...Anyway, I thought I should come by and check on you, just to make sure you're really not about to keel over."

Patrick feels as though this is still a definite risk, but he crosses his arms over his belly and tries to think up something to say. "Um... I'm alright now. No... _Keeling_ going on in here."

"Patrick? What's wrong?" His mom frowns and immediately reaches out to touch his face.

He attempts a carefree smile and feels his face contort in an uncomfortable grimace. "Nothing's _wrong_ ," He promises.

"Well, nothing's right, why do you look like that?"

Patrick looks down at himself, thinking she means his bloated stomach, until he realises she was referring to his pained expression. Then he makes the mistake of trying to pull his hat, which is escaping, back onto his head, clearly exposing too much belly to Patricia's searching eyes.

"Patrick, what is that?" Her voice is a little shrill, as though she's seen something hideous bulging out of him.

"It's nothing," Patrick crosses his arms again, blushing as though she's commenting on his weight.

"Sweetheart, that's not nothing _._ " She tries to pry his arms apart, and Patrick lets her since the reveal has to happen at some point. "Oh my God, Patrick. What - what is?"

Patrick pulls back, cradling his belly. "I'm - you know when I was feeling sick a while ago? I..."

"You're pregnant!" His mom's face breaks in horror, leaving Patrick that same sinking feeling he had when he received his high school diploma by scraping a pass because he'd dedicated all his time to music instead of studying, and had to bring it home to her. "Patrick, that was _months_ ago! Why - why haven't you done anything about it?"

"Because!" Patrick groans, wishing this had happened anywhere but his own apartment where he can't just storm out. He doesn't want to tell her he didn't want to do anything about it, because it isn't true. But he wasn't going to, and he hadn't, and it's not going to happen.

"Right. We can get you to CT Hospital, they have a -"

"I'm not getting rid of it!" Patrick tells her firmly.

His mom gapes at him in shock. If grey hairs could appear in real time, Patrick is sure he would see it now. "Patrick! You -"

"No! It's too late, I'm six months pregnant and I'm keeping it," He tells her again.

"Six months?" She croaks. "Pa - you're too young! You're - you're - you!"

"What about me?" Patrick scoffs.

"I fought so _hard_ to support you Patrick!" She cups her face in her hands, shaking her head. "All those arguments with your father! My own parents!"

"Then support me now!" Patrick's throat closes around the words, because he shouldn't have to ask, not when he'd never had to before.

"I can't support you in making a mistake!" She crows, loud enough for the neighbours to hear.

"Who's making a mistake?" Comes Pete's voice from outside the front door, followed by Pete who unfortunately happens to be carrying a _Babies 'R' Us_ bag.

"What is that?" Patrick’s mom hisses with such aggression that Pete falls back half a pace and out of the door. She whirls back to face Patrick. “Am I the last person to find this out? Is this why Pete's mother isn’t returning my calls?”

“Uh,” Pete stammers in surprise.

“Mom,” Patrick pleads, close to tears.

She draws herself together. “Why didn’t you tell me? We could’ve sorted this out.”

Patrick tries not to sound too angry, but his voice wavers. “I don’t want anything _sorted out_.”

His mother looks from him to Pete, who has slowly returned to the apartment, and from Pete to the _Babies 'R' Us_  bag. “Why are you here?”

“Patrick’s my best friend.” Pete tells her earnestly, making Patrick's chest seize a little. 

“If he’s your best friend,” She spits, and Pete flinches. She’s never been aggressive to him before, in fact, she's rarely aggressive to anyone - unless she thinks she's protecting Patrick. “Then why would you let him do this?”

Pete looks baffled, clutching his bag. “It wasn’t my decision.”

“Mom, you should - we should talk about this once you've calmed down. Pete didn't do anything wrong." Patrick shuts up. His eyes sting and he can hear his own teeth creaking as they grind against each other.

“You’re my child, Patrick. You’re not ready to have another one,” His mom tells him with certainty. “Look at what this is doing to you! It took you years to be happy with your body.”

Patrick does look down at himself. She’s right about everything, and he hates her for it.

“I think you should leave,” Pete says.

“I don’t care what you think!” She snaps.

“Please go,” Patrick’s body betrays him and the words come out as sobs. “Just get out.”

She actually does, which he isn’t expecting, pushing past Pete and storming through the shared hallway outside.

Pete and Patrick stand by the door, saying nothing. Patrick’s chest is heaving, his breath coming like he’s just run a marathon.

“Are you okay?” Pete asks after a minute.

“Why did you have to bring that stupid bag?” Patrick rounds on him, tears streaming down his face heedless of his attempts to stop them.

“I – I only wanted to, I just –“ Pete stumbles over his words looking dismayed.

Patrick grits his teeth, irritated by how Pete _just takes it_ when all Patrick really wants is a fight. “You fucked everything up!”

“I know, I’m sorry,” Pete pleads, dropping the bag onto the floor with a soft thud and a rattle. “I’ll take it back!”

“It doesn’t matter _now,_ does it?” Patrick glares at him for a second, but Pete’s miserable face is too pathetic for him to look at and he’s forced to storm off into his room to avoid it.

Unfortunately what he’s avoiding can be neatly summed by the word “guilt”, and after less than a minute of abusing a pillow, it’s no longer avoidable at all, so Patrick lets himself feel like shit for half an hour so he doesn’t have to think about all the reasons his _mom_ should feel terrible instead.

It takes a while to talk himself into an apology, but when he gets back from his tantrum, Pete isn’t there. Patrick searches for his phone, since Pete obviously has gone back to the store, but instead of his cell he finds the bag on the couch, still full of stuff.

He upends it onto the coffee table and leafs through the assortment of things. It’s an odd mix, of vitamin refills, generic baby onesies, a baby toiletry starter pack for a child who needs almost as many potions and lotions as Pete does, a donkey shaped beanie toy, and a pair of red velvet overalls aged 9-12 months.

When Patrick eventually finds his phone, he texts Pete an apology, answered a few minutes later by a message that says simply, _you’re a dick,_ which probably means the apology is not accepted.

The rest of his texts go unanswered, and eventually he stops trying. He turns on the TV and ends up watching a documentary about birth that makes the baby kick him in the bladder, followed by the second Star Wars movie, and then, because nothing is on, two solid hours of _Airport Patrol_.

He's not even sure if he's asleep when someone tries the door, or if he's just so bored his brain has actually stopped functioning. Pete swears at the lock for several minutes before Patrick drags his ever-increasing-bulk off the couch and opens it for him.

“You're an _arsehole_ ,” Pete grimaces at him, eyeliner smudged and running on one side.

“I know.” Patrick steps aside holding the door open, and Pete falls through it.

“Why – why are you so mean to me, Patrick?” Pete whines, grabbing Patrick's shoulder for balance. “I just, I try really hard.”

“Uh, yeah, I'm sorry.” Patrick drags him back towards the couch and sits him down.

Pete sags forward without relinquishing his grip. “It's not very nice.”

Patrick sighs, and Pete is sick on his couch.

“Okay,” Patrick groans, forcing Pete back to his feet and bustling into the bathroom. “Time to return a few favours, huh?”

Pete nods and grumbles indistinctly, blinking in the stronger light of the bathroom.

Patrick leaves him with his head over the toilet bowl while he clears up the couch. When he gets back, Pete is asleep with his head resting on the edge of the seat.

“Hey, come on Pete,” Patrick shakes him awake. “Let's get you to bed.”

“There's too much things in there,” Pete slurs as Patrick fills a cup with water.

“Here, rinse your mouth with this.”

“Okay.” Pete manages to hold the cup himself and take a large mouthful, swirling it round his mouth before promptly swallowing it. “Yuk.”

“Gross. Come on, this way,” Patrick guides him to his bedroom, but Pete's right, there really is too much stuff in there. Getting Pete into his own bed would require the kind of heavy lifting that Patrick is definitely banned from, and could probably never manage anyway.

“You should be kinder to me,” Pete insists sadly and with a lot of effort as Patrick arranges him in Patrick’s bed. “You can't just make me be your baby’s daddy and then be cross with me all the time…”

“I know. I'm sorry okay?” Patrick wonders for a moment whether Pete really means his choice of words, and then tugs off his shoes and climbs in beside him. “It's time to go to sleep.”

“I’m not _tired_ ,” Pete complains, struggling to get up. “I think I’ll have another drink before I go to bed.”

“Lie down,” Patrick says, trying to get him to lie flat. “It's bed time. And don't be sick on me in the night, I like this t-shirt.”

“Just a – just –“ Pete continues struggling until Patrick gives up and he rocks forward into a sitting position. 

He leans precariously close to Patrick and grabs his belly with both hands without warning, bringing his face to within an inch of it. “Goodnight baby.”

“Goodnight _Pete_ ,” Patrick shoves him off.

It’s not a great night, because both Pete and the baby kick, and Patrick gets round to bad dream after bad dream.

In the first, he gives birth; not in a hospital, or screaming in pain; in fact, he doesn’t even take his pants off in the dream. He just sits on the couch, pregnant, and stands up, no longer pregnant, and when he turns around to check why, there’s something there where he was sitting, a mess of placenta and umbilical cords and that weird sac he’s seen surrounding newborn animals in documentaries. He searches through  the mass, putting his hands wrist deep, then elbow deep, and then so far in that his cheek is brushing the warm, wet organs, but he can’t find the baby. Something screams near his ear, but he just can’t find it.

He wakes up to someone prodding at his bladder and has to get up to pee, disengaging Pete’s legs from his own.

When he gets back to sleep, he’s in stirrups, and Dr Richards is there, with Dr Muller standing by his side, discussing Patrick as though he isn’t there. He can hear what they’re saying, but the words are reproachful, complex and medical and he doesn’t understand.

He strains to sit up, to see them, but wishes he hadn’t when he sees Dr Muller’s approaching, a syringe in his hand that looks… Oddly familiar.

“We must put an end to this now,” Muller says. “We can’t have this sort of nonsense making a mockery of our practice!”

He moves between Patrick’s legs, and shoves his gown up so that it covers nothing.

“No!” Patrick groans, but his legs are somehow locked into the stirrups.

The needle comes closer, and Patrick can’t tell where it’s going, in his womb or – or – the needle is thick, a sharp scratch and then a deep ache as it cuts into the muscle of his ass, and then Dr Muller depresses the plunger, and he feels it. Cold for a few seconds, painful, but already heating up as the needle pulls out.

Patrick sobs and scrambles to check himself, feeling for the place where the needle entered, but unable to tell where he’s pressing because the whole muscle hurts.

“Patrick!”

Pete is sitting up next to him with the bedside light on, and Patrick is taking up most of the bed, curled awkwardly with both hands cupped to his own ass.

For a second, he stays that way, muted by confusion, pressing his fingers into the small scar on his right cheek, half expecting to find the muscle beneath them hard and inflamed, as though replaced by hot stone.

“Are you okay?” Pete asks shakily.

Finding himself unharmed, Patrick places his hands on top of the blankets. “I’m fine,” He says, sounding a little surprised and more than a little shaken.

“ _Are_ you?” Pete repeats, watching Patrick with groggy eyes.

“Weird dreams,” Patrick mumbles, falling back into the pillow with a soft thump.

“Why am I in your bed?” Pete stage whispers, kicking until his jeans fall off onto Patrick’s floor.

“You’re gonna have a massive fucking hangover in the morning. You get three guesses,” Patrick says, closing his eyes.

“We got married in Vegas and it was so expensive we’re having the honeymoon in your apartment,” Pete gives a sigh of fake wistfulness and snuggles up beside him.

Patrick makes a noise of discontent, but he’s too tired to shake him off.

“I feel like crap, but it was probably worth it for all the hookers and gambling, and you dancing on that pole, dude.”

“Piss off,” Patrick grumbles.

“Nope.” Pete’s hand slides up under Patrick’s t-shirt to lie flat above his womb.

Patrick is comfortable and tired; he doesn’t bother to move him.

 

 

When Patrick was younger, he’d hated mirrors and photographs, but he hadn’t been able to stop looking at them. He’d spent hours and hours in front of mirrors, watching as his breasts grew from nothing at all into a life-defining crisis. The first scraps of flesh hadn’t bothered him. The B cups did, and the C cups that followed them. He went from being taller than most of his male friends to being shorter than all of them, and the hair growing over the genitals he didn’t want had done nothing to make him feel better when the boys in his grade had gross neck-beards and crackling voices.

Patrick regards himself in the mirror with disgust for the first time since the first exciting signs of the puberty he’d always wanted had shown up on his skin. Not that he was ever delighted with his appearance – but it was so much better than he’d ever expected that he’s spent most of the last 7 years watching the mirror with relief.

He doesn’t feel relieved anymore. His nipples have grown and his areolae look weird, spreading now beyond the faint scar that rings them so that it looks like he has flat breasts and big nipples with a stripe around them. His scars look thick in the light of his bathroom, like he’s been slashed across the chest, and he feels uncomfortable and uneven before he even looks down at his belly.

He stares at his reflection until he can no longer see it for tears that burn his eyes, until he feels sick, until he wants to claw his nipples off and his womb out just to make it stop.

"Patrick?" Pete calls from outside the door. "I can't make your dryer work!"

Patrick turns off the light, grateful for a moment in which it's too dark to see his reflection, and then steels himself to just  _get on with it._ "That's cos you put too much in it."

"I don't! I put like, six things in there!"

Patrick sighs. It's better to leave the bathroom now anyway, before his eyes adjust and he can see his reflection in the dark. "Coming."

 

 

“I was thinking,” Pete announces as Patrick’s phone buzzes with yet another text from his sister.

“Mhmm,” Patrick hums, tapping out a reply about how he has nothing to say to their mother.

“We should turn a room into a nursery or something.”

Patrick looks up at him. “Dude. We’re not like, British aristocrats. It’s just a kid’s bedroom.”

“Well we should have one of those then,” Pete grins as though he isn’t having half the conversation and leaving all the difficult parts up to assumption. “And I was thinking, maybe, more space.”

“More space than here?” Patrick asks stupidly, as though he’s never heard of such a thing, despite the fact that the only reason they can all fit into his living room is because they’re all basically tiny (less and less so in Patrick’s case).

Pete shrugs sheepishly. “It’s not like much of a kid-friendly house is it? Kids need gardens and space to roam.”

“You're thinking of cats,” Patrick says, trying not to sound too weary but already able to see lines tightening on Pete’s face.

“I’m just saying, you could move back to the burbs.”

“This is the burbs. You can hardly even see the sky scrapers from the roof.”

“Burbier burbs though,” Pete pouts. “And we’re gonna need another bedroom anyway.”

“We are?” Patrick raises an eyebrow.

Pete flops towards him like a maiden overcome by her shortness of breath, leaning heavily on Patrick’s arm. “Me and your instruments need a place to sleep! You can’t kick me out Patrick! Where will I go? Me, a mere spinster, alone in the world.”

“Get off!” Patrick shoves him.

“Not until you say you won’t kick me out!” Pete clings on. “I can cook, clean and sew! Don’t turn me out onto the streets!”

“Literally none of those things are true. You sew like a six year old and you cook like a single guy in his forties, let me go!” Patrick shakes his arm until Pete loses his grip. It wakes up the baby, who punches him in the cervix.

“Patriiick,” Pete whines, pouting pathetically. “Patrick.”

“Oh for God’s sake, I’m not gonna kick you out,” Patrick relents.

“Oh _Patrick_ ,” Pete sighs. “I thought you’d never ask.”

Patrick elbows him in the side. It's not like he was gonna kick Pete out, anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for dysphoria and nightmares relating to medical abuse, miscarriage; brief gore.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey folks - sorry for the long wait, had exams and lots of stuff that had to happen and involved no laptop for long periods of time!

Panic is in town and Patrick should feel like meeting them, but he doesn’t. In the end, he just gets Brendon, sick of party after party he’s not allowed to drink at, who skives off from the post-show revelry in favour of making Patrick aware of just how extroverted one teenager can be.

He arrives on the doorstep around 10pm with a pizza and a bunch of artifically coloured lillies with a card that reads  _Get well soon_  in swirling print type and  _if you’re sick or continue not being sick if you’re already fine love Brendon and Panic!_  in metallic sharpie.

“You weren’t at the show,” He says as Patrick opens the door.

“Sorry. Wasn’t feeling up to it,” Patrick smiles apologetically, accepting the bouquet so that he can hold it between Brendon and his belly.

“Guess I didn’t waste twenty dollars on the flowers then,” Brendon replies, and invites himself inside.

"You know lillies are what you give when people die, right?" Patrick puts the flowers in a vase, feeling grown up by contrast to Brendon. which is a relief, even though it’s his only vase and it was definitely meant to be a carafe, a gift from Mark when he'd still aspired for them to live together in Mark's luxury apartment. Brendon is sitting cross-legged on Patrick's couch while Patrick finds napkins, which might be exaggerating their age difference somewhat.

"Hope for the best, prepare for the worst!" Brendon replies cheerfully, blotting grease off his pizza with a napkin. "So, what's up?"

Patrick stares at him as though he’s never been asked such a question, until he realises he’s supposed to be ill. “Uh, nothing serious. Want a drink?”

“Whatever’s going. 'Nothing serious' isn’t what they were saying on the web, by the way. I heard you’re delaying the new album,” Brendon somehow manages to field his deflection at the first hurdle.

“Yeah, but only by a short while.” Patrick goes to the kitchen for drinks in hope of Brendon learning when to drop it during his brief absence. He considers giving Brendon his last beer, but when he pokes his head round the door frame, the kid is crouching by the shelves in the corner making Patrick's Han Solo kiss his Chewbacca figurine, and he ends up bringing him coke instead. “Here you go.”

Brendon carefully positions Chewbacca on the table so that he's holding the cup, fixes Patrick with his big, thickly-lined kid eyes and asks, “Are you sick?”

“No…” Patrick walks round the other side of the couch to sit next to him, hunched a little even though this is the loosest cardigan he owns. Well. It used to be.

“Anyone ever told you you’re really shit at avoiding a question?” Brendon takes his coke from Chewie and sips it.

“Ironic,” Patrick chuckles bitterly. It only makes Brendon look more concerned, to the extent that it begins to look affected. Patrick thinks his face probably just looks that way. “Everyone’s pissed at me for actually managing that too well.”

“Oh yeah? Why’s that?” Brendon leans back and crosses his arms, ageing a few years in a single motion. “Come on man, spill. Sooner’s always better than later.”

Sooner isn’t Patrick’s strong suit. “Yeah. Do you know what transgender is?”

Brendon goes very still. “No. What is it?”

“Have you heard of LGBT before?” Patrick tries again, not at all enthusiastic at having to explain.

“Gay,” Brendon says quietly. He shifts uncomfortably in his seat, as though Patrick is interrogating him on something.

“That’s the G, yeah. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and…” He tries to lead Brendon into it, but gets only a blank look in return. “Transgender, it’s like transsexual.”

Brendon just stares at him, expression mild but confused. “I don’t get it.”

Patrick doesn’t know why he feels so disappointed; it isn’t like he hadn’t known Brendon was raised Mormon, that he’d only had a few years to be exposed to anything non-heteronormative. He’d just kind of  _wanted_  him to understand so badly, he’d sort of assumed he would. Maybe he’d imagined Brendon’s apparently ambiguous sexuality would’ve led him to exploring things a little more.

Brendon reads the disappointment on his face immediately and frowns. He repeats, “I don’t get what you’re trying to tell me.”

Patrick swallows a sigh and forces a smile. “I’m… I used… I’m a guy, but I have a… A vagina and not a penis. I used to be a girl. Supposedly. And now I’m not.”

Brendon looks stunned, his mouth hanging open a little way. Not rudely so, because even though he’s a rebel child he’s not been raised that way. Eventually he seems to relax and says, “You don’t really look like a girl though.”

“I had a male puberty,” Patrick tells him, confusing him even more. “When I was sixteen, they gave me hormones that made me like this.”

“Boobs?”

Patrick smiles at the one word question. Typical nineteen year old priorities, he supposes. “Gone.”

“Where did they go?” Brendon asks with mild concern.

Patrick wants to tease, but he doesn’t think that would make anything clearer for Brendon, so he doesn’t. “I had surgery when I was eighteen to get rid of them.”

Brendon shuffles further into the couch, looking thoughtful. “Can I ask – can I ask about…” He gestures at Patrick in general. “What about a penis? You said you…”

“The surgery is scary, expensive, requires a flesh sacrifice in the form of a large square of skin from somewhere on your body and a vein out your arm. I want a penis, but I don’t want one more than I want to avoid that.” Patrick lets himself sit back next to him, folding his arms over himself. It’s easier now he’s started, feels a little more like when Brendon and Ryan and Spencer were young and fresh and new, and they’d spent hours explaining recording and touring and band life to them. He's used to this question, from when he had to explain to his family and the few friends his mom kept in contact with.

“That sounds like something my mormon youth counsellor would say, but okay. Just, dude, why didn’t you want to be a girl? Girls are awesome,” Brendon grins, almost too enthusiastically. 

Patrick shakes his head. “Why didn’t  _you_  want to? I just… Never really was one, I don’t think. I used to think when I was a kid that I’d just grow up and become a guy. I didn’t understand that I – “ But he shuts his mouth, because it suddenly hurts him to think about it.

Brendon nods, rubbing his eyes and looking like he has no idea what’s going on, but has realised that his window for politely questioning it has closed. “So they’re pissed because you didn’t tell them you were –  _were_  – a girl?”

“Yeah,” Patrick sighs deeply, looking over at Brendon’s smudged eyeliner whilst he weighs up the full confession. “That and I’m pregnant.”

Brendon barks a laugh in shock, and gazes in some kind of admiration at Patrick’s utter disregard for what Brendon has been raised to think of as The Right Thing. “What? Are you for real?”

Patrick nods, pulling his hands away. “Yeah. Well. The guys aren’t too pissed about that, but my mom is. I’m too young, and I’m well, me, so she…”

Brendon snorts. “Too young? If I’d stayed with my parents I’d’ve finished my mission by your age and have a wife and a baby on the way.”

Patrick winces uncomfortably. He doesn’t like the idea of Brendon having to leave his parents to get away from such a life. “ _That_  I don’t understand.”

Brendon shrugs. “It’s just our – their way.”

The pause is almost as pregnant as Patrick while they both dwell on the life Brendon was meant to have.

“So,” Brendon breaks the silence and reaches out a hand towards Patrick’s belly. “How pregnant are you?”

Patrick lets him place his fingers delicately just below his belly button. “About half way. There was a complication a couple weeks ago, but they think it’s fine now.”

"You know, that's the weirdest thing about - you know, not living with my family," Brendon puts on a grin, looking small again. "I'm just so used to there being babies all the time. There's always a new baby, or maybe two or three, just in my own family, and then all the people we know, they have loads of kids. There's always weddings and stuff going on. People think it's weird, but it's actually the best part. My sister's just had her second, I'm gonna go visit soon. My parents have calmed down a lot this last year."

Brendon's still putting up a brave face, but Patrick feels like he might cry on his behalf. "I wouldn't hold out on any weddings here."

"Wait, so who's the dad? Do you have a... Uh...?" Brendon takes his hand of Patrick's belly and elbows his arm suggestively.

"Some asshole," Patrick says, his melancholy carrying through the abrupt change of subject. "You probably won't meet him."

"Oh." Brendon is quiet for a moment. "So, does that make you gay, because you're like, kind of a guy, or straight because you're actually a - you know?"

"I'm bisexual," Patrick says, a little too briskly.

"So it's the same either way then. Huh."

"But just so we're - if I only liked men, I'd be gay," Patrick feels forced to clarify.

Brendon seems to know he's been rude and goes quiet for a minute.

Brendon doesn’t say anything about getting rid of it, and Patrick supposes he’s spent too long with abortion not on the radar that it just doesn’t occur to him. In fact, he seems generally excited at the idea of a baby, the only person besides Pete to actually start extolling the virtues of babies and of Patrick as a parent, spilling his coke on himself as he bounces on the couch and trying to coax the baby into giving a palpable kick and failing.

It’s sweet. Patrick manages to relax into it, because Brendon  _expects him_  to be happy about it. He wants to hug Brendon whenever he gets close enough, and a few times he does. Brendon hugs back, like he does with his bandmates on stage, all long-limbed and cuddleable. Patrick can’t tell if it’s the pregnancy hormones or just being used to the extra closeness with Pete that does it, but Brendon’s adorable face and big eyes definitely affect him more than they used to. Patrick keeps him talking about how things are now Jon is in the band for a long while, trying to keep clear of difficult subjects in case things go the same way as they have the last few weeks and he ends up crying and hugging Brendon or bawling for Pete or something equally embarrassing.

“Are you coming to Halloween?” Brendon asks eagerly as he ties his shoes at nearly 2am. “It’s gonna be epic.”

He must be referring to the party he and Pete had been planning on having months ago; Patrick hasn’t actually given it a thought since.

“Probably not.” He smiles his apology.

“Ah, that’s okay,” Brendon smiles back. Patrick hadn’t realised that disappointed smiles were a thing, but he’s been wrong all this time.

“Uh, I’ll see you soon though. Drive safe.”

Not being able to go to Halloween parties seems horribly final; Patrick’s finally hit the end of his Pete-extended childhood, and it’s depressing as hell.

 

 

At the start of week 26, Patrick’s formerly innie belly button pops out, which is more upsetting than he’d thought it would be, or maybe he's just starting to lose his shit, because it shouldn't be this disturbing. He goes to brush something off his shirt when he’s about to start making spaghetti Bolognese, and it refuses to be brushed off; only after a minute of non-committal but genuine attempts does he realise what’s sticking out is just a part of him.

It’s weird, because he’s never seen it like that before, and the suddenness of the change freaks him out. A small piece of long-lost lint is stuck to it, and Patrick spends a good half hour shoving Pete’s hair products aside to prod it in front of the bathroom mirror, to no effect. He’s too scared to try and push it back in, but he’d probably fail if he tried. There’s also a line across bisecting his belly, from below his diaphragm to the start of his pubic hair, which reminds him of his childhood misconceptions about birth which all seemed to involve women’s bellies splitting vertically open in a conveniently hinged manner.  There is something splitting though; the skin along his sides and coming up from his lower abdomen has ripped, unable to keep up with Patrick's growth, leaving jagged, irregular lines standing out in bright red against his pasty white flesh.

He tells himself he’s the only one who’ll notice the belly button thing, right up until Pete has returned from a meeting with the label and is telling him about it.

“So, they’re pressuring quite a lot to get a single released, but I told them if you couldn’t do it you couldn’t – Dude, is that your belly button?” Pete asks as Patrick turns around from the stove to try and find the cheese he’s certain he already took out of the fridge.

“Uh,” Patrick blushes, even though he knows it’s normal from the pregnancy book.

“Wow, that’s so weird. I mean, I never really – I guess it makes sense,” Pete ponders aloud, staring at Patrick’s stomach.

“We could do the single if we had the studio to ourselves and we did it really soon,” Patrick says to avoid focussing more on his belly button.

“Are you see it?” Pete says.

“What?” Patrick squints, but however he tries to rearrange the words they still don’t make a sentence.

“I mean, are you sure about the single, and also can I please please pretty please see your belly button?” Pete smiles innocently at him.

“No way!” Patrick curls away from him, holding the colander he’s about to drain the pasta in protectively out in front of him.

“But I’m your best friend,” Pete complains, genuinely affronted. “We’re like, soulmates. You can’t hide your belly button from your soulmate forever, Patrick.”

“Like hell I can’t!” Patrick raises the colander like a weapon.

“You can touch my bellybutton if you want,” Pete roles up his hoodie, blue with tiny red skull-and-crossbones all over it, and the t-shirt underneath it, demonstratively. It reveals just what Patrick doesn’t have; smooth, flat, brown skin, with no stretch-marks and no attempts on the part of Mother Nature to drastically alter the skyline, not a blemish beyond his bartskull tattoo. It makes Patrick feel sick with what he knows is the potential for humiliation.

“Why the hell would I want that?” Patrick scoffs, pressing his front against the kitchen counter as he drains the spaghetti. “This is like the time you offered for me to pee in your shower when all I wanted was for _you_ to stop pissing in _mine_.”

“I haven’t done that since I’ve been here this time,” Pete sighs, like Patrick’s dredging up a dead horse of an argument. “What kind of boyfriend won’t let you see his bellybutton?”

“The kind who’s just your fake boyfriend for the hospital to let you in.” Patrick dumps the pasta back into the pan. When Pete still doesn’t look appeased he adds, “You wouldn’t want to see it anyway. It’s pretty unattractive.”

It’s meant to be a joke, but Pete’s face falls a little like it always does when Patrick is insulted and He, Joe or Andy had not been the ones to do it. “What do you mean, unattractive?”

Patrick shrugs in a _well what did you expect_? Kind of way and shoves Pete out the way to grab plates.

But Pete would sooner drop a jibe to his mother and stands rooted to the spot in the kitchen instead of helping like he ought. “Dude, you know bellies are _meant_ to get big in pregnancy, right?”

“Yeah, I think I remember something about that from eighth grade health class, thanks,” Patrick frowns. He looks at Pete, standing there with his eyeliner and his straightened hair and his artfully ripped jeans and thinks, not for the first time, that Pete has absolutely _no idea_ what it means to feel ugly.

Pete opens his mouth to say something and Patrick cuts him off.

“Can you just fucking drop it and eat your food, please?”

They eat in silence. When Pete tries to apologize later, Patrick glares at him until he gives up.

 

 

Patrick doesn’t feel any less hideous the next day. He deeply regrets that his shower faces a mirror on the back of the bathroom door, and the sight of his own skin leaves him with the strong desire to crawl out of it and leave it behind, like a caterpillar, except knowing his luck, he’d turn out to be a wasp instead of a butterfly; _hell,_ he thinks, poking at himself,  _I’m more of a maggot than a caterpillar anyway._

Still, Pete is more productive than he is by a considerable margin, and manages to get them in the studio for the day after that, so he has to swallow his disgust while he works and reworks every last bit of the song over and over with the band, until even Joe looks like he can’t stand another minute of the song. Andy, of course, had the beat down when he first heard the song a few weeks back and hasn’t needed to add a single tap of a hi-hat since.

In spite of everything, the song is good. It’s really good, possibly one of the best they’ve ever made. At least while he’s playing it, Patrick is satisfied with the sound.

On the morning, when the guys and Patrick turn up with Patrick in a thick hoodie despite the weather, it turns out that Neil Avron has apparently been pulled out of nowhere to produce for them; the label is doing absolutely everything they can to make this a hit.

Patrick’s fingers feel numb while he plays and he fumbles the strings a few times, but Joe picks up the slack and he gets through the day feeling renewed and musical and able to play again. He feels talented.

The elation doesn’t last when the pain in his arm fails to go away; it’s killing him all night, a weird burning feeling that spreads up his thumb and first few fingers on his left hand. It’s only slightly better the next morning.

He doesn’t go to the doctor, because first off, he’s now terrified of them, and is only intending on going back there to make sure his birth doesn’t make it into the Alien franchise, and second, he already knows it’s carpel fucking tunnel.

He says as much to Pete in a tone of voice that suggests it’s Pete’s fault.

“You’re gonna go through way more pain than carpel tunnel before you’re done,” Pete tells him cheerfully before he realises that Patrick really isn’t in the mood.

“This kid had better be worth it,” Patrick grumbles, trying to hold his wrist in a position that doesn’t give his fingers pins and needles, and finding none.

“It will be. This is the carpel tunnel of love, baby.” Pete cocks his head as it lights up with some kind of bad idea. “That’d be a great line in a song. Or maybe a name for one. See, it’s already paying off!”

Patrick really doesn’t see it that way, and none of Pete's forced cheer does anything to change that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a heads up that the next chapters will be more intense in terms of dysphoria and deteriorating mental health than those before them.


	12. Chapter 12

He gets a text from Pete when Pete is out and Patrick is home under self-imposed house arrest.

It says, _dnt frek out._

Which immediately makes Patrick freak out, because that means the answer to his _about what?_ Is something that’s going to freak him out.

_1 intrvu_

_What?_

_label wants us 2 do a bunch of intervus abt th single & i said id do thm bt thy wnt u 2 do at lest 1_

Patrick sits on this for a minute. He can see himself reflected in the off screen of his TV and he definitely looks pregnant.

_I cant. Im the size of a fucking house_

_Ur not. Ill sort u sum clothes thtll hide it_

Patrick spends another minute trying to think up any conceivable situation in which this could end well, and he can’t. It’s going to be a disaster. Also, he knows his fashion sense is terrible. He does. He just doesn’t trust that Pete’s usual “so bad it’s good” is going to look anything more than “so bad” on him.

_Fine. Sooner rather than later tho._

_Whatevr u want bb thnx xx_

Patrick turns on the TV so he doesn’t have to see his own reflection, fat, bulging at the middle and incredibly pale, gleaming back at him.

 

 

One interview as soon as possible actually turns out to be a TV interview with a live, debut performance of the upcoming single in two weeks’ time.

When Patrick finds out, he flips, going back on every promise of kindness made to drunken Pete two weeks ago.

“What the fuck? Why the hell did you make me agree to this?” Patrick yells the last part so loudly that the occupants of the neighbouring apartment bang on the wall in a futile attempt at shutting him up, gesturing to his phone with the text from their manager telling them what they’re in for.  He waves  it hard enough that it threatens to fly out of his hand and into Pete’s stupid head.

“It’s not my fault! They told me we’d only be talking for ten minutes, I didn’t think that meant ‘talking for ten minutes but on screen for an hour’!”

“Pete! I am going to be twenty-eight weeks pregnant, _seven months_ pregnant, when we do that fucking TV show! Everyone is going to know!” Patrick’s phone whizzes past Pete’s face and through the door to the kitchen where it hits something breakable.

“It’ll be fine, we’ll dress you up so no one can tell, okay?” Pete tries to soothe him to no avail.

“The only way you’re gonna be able to dress me up without anyone knowing I’m pregnant is if I go dressed as the Michelin man!” Patrick fumes.

“You’d make a lovely Michelin man though,” Pete tells him, because he always knows to say exactly the wrong thing. It’s like a shitty superpower which has the direct effect of making Patrick utterly furious.

“You phone them up and you fucking cancel. I mean it, Pete!” Patrick's neighbours thump the wall again and Patrick marches over to it and pounds back.

“It’s already been confirmed. Come on, I promise it’ll be _fine_.” Pete puts out his hands in a gesture of peace that Patrick is not at all willing to accept.

Patrick fully means to shout and maybe throw some more things, but the rest of his body has clearly worked out that if he cries he’s more likely to get his outcome, and it gets the ball rolling without his permission. He feels his face crumple as he bursts into tears so ugly he has to turn his face away so that Pete doesn’t see them.

“I’m gonna look disgusting!” He whines snottily, shielding his face with his hands as Pete tries to come round the side to get in front of him. “It’s going to be a fucking disaster!”

“Fuck oh fuck, right, please don’t…” Pete flaps his hands against Patrick’s arms. “I’ll call them up and talk to them, just – Christ.”

Having got what he’d wanted, Patrick’s body should decide to pack it in, but instead it bawls whilst Pete dials the number, as though to stop would risk him going back on his word. Patrick clamps his mouth shut on the sound as soon as he hears someone pick up, and has to hold his breath to keep it in.

“Hi, yeah, it’s Pete Wentz,” Pete says, shooing Patrick from the room.

The call lasts just long enough for Patrick to realise he’s mortally embarrassed about what just happened. He sits on the lid of the toilet in the bathroom and waits for the call to end with a heightened sense of anxiety that even manages to distract him from the numbness in his hand.

“Dude,” Pete shouts through the bathroom door. “Don’t kill me!”

Patrick resolves to kill Pete if there’s been no change; he can’t live with Pete having witnessed his outburst with absolutely nothing to show for it. “No promises.”

“They’re gonna rearrange the order of the show so we only have to go on at the end. It’ll be our ten minutes and then the song to close and then we’re off, that’s it.”

“People are still going to see me when I stand up for the song,” Patrick grits, gesturing down at his own expansive abdomen.

“You’ll have your guitar in front of you.”

Patrick doesn’t reply, because it’s not good enough, but there’s nothing either of them can do about it.

“Thanks, Pete,” Pete says to himself, lightly.

“Sorry,” Patrick sighs, because he’s now the kind of guy that apologises for the same thing over and over without changing his ways. He’s not even sorry, really; he knows his anger is misplaced, but directing it at Pete is easier than directing it at nobody.

“Can I come in or are you taking a shit?” Pete asks, turning the handle in warning.

“Ew! No I am not!” Patrick says, accidentally giving Pete permission to enter, closing the door behind him and leaning against it.

“How’s your arm?”

“It hurts.” Patrick frowns at Pete's overly gentle tone and then remembers that he was crying less than ten minutes ago.

“I don’t really know what to do when you’re upset like that,” Pete admits, as though they're halfway into a heart-to-heart. “It’s like, I can see you hurting, and I’m sorta used to that, but I’ve never had to experience you really expressing it that often.”

“Well for a start you can try not to get too deep,” Patrick blushes, looking at his hands. They’re kind of itchy, but he hasn’t really noticed that compared to the carpel tunnel.

“I can’t just leave it. I’m a poet, remember?” Pete is coming closer, and Patrick regrets sitting down, because it’s going to make any attempt on his part to escape doubly obvious.

He bites back a hurtful reply. He’s been around too long to think Pete conceited, but he still feels the need to attack him, to make himself seem less weak by being the more aggressive. “What if I can’t play? What if I fuck it all up?”

Pete takes Patrick’s injured hand in his own, running his fingers up and down Patrick’s wrist. “I’ll get you a support tomorrow. It’ll help a bit.”

Patrick doesn’t say anything. He lets Pete manipulate his hand and arm, stroking and rubbing muscle and tendon. It doesn’t help all that noticeably, but it doesn’t hurt either. Patrick leans his head against the bathroom wall and watches Pete massage his wrist.

It doesn’t occur to him how close they are until it’s almost over, but once it has it's inescapable. Pete touches him a lot, but it’s always boisterous. Even his hugs have an energy to them that this doesn’t, and Patrick can’t quite convince himself that none of the tingling in his fingers is to do with Pete’s caressing them.  If nothing else, it distracts him from his irritation.

“I’m glad you didn’t die that time,” Patrick says before he realises that that’s probably the one thing that could make this moment more awkward. He’s said something to that effect before, but not since shortly after the incident in question.

"Uh, thanks..." Pete’s fingers still against Patrick’s and he simply holds Patrick’s wrist aloft. It hangs a little limp, but Pete’s hand is warm and the elevation is probably doing it good.

“I mean it,” Patrick continues, even though Pete’s said nothing to imply that he doesn’t. “Until all this, I knew I had a best friend. I just didn’t know what it meant.”

“Now who’s deep?” Pete forces a laugh, brushing the moment aside. He puts Patrick’s hand back in his lap and goes to wash his own.

“Shut up,” Patrick blushes, standing up and heading for the door, eager to be on the other side of it. “It almost makes up for that time you peed in my bath just before I got in it.”

“You have to forgive me for that stuff!” Pete’s voice follows him into the living room. “You can’t stay pissed at your soulmate forever, man.”

“Pissing is obviously your area,” Patrick shouts back at him, and then he laughs because he can’t believe this conversation is being mediated by all of Pete’s most anti-social behaviours.

 

 

Pete is mostly out after that. He’s negotiating things with the label, or designing clothes, some of which he says are for Patrick, which is the most disturbing thing of all. Patrick sees a lot of Joe, because he’s the only person around he can stand to have see _him_ , and that’s a stretch these days. He’s too big to leave the house anymore, so now he's simply trapped indoors, all day, every day.

Pete’s increasing workload is compounded by the Halloween party he’s been organising with Panic!, which has a guest list full of people all slightly too important to cancel on. It’s in LA, which means Pete flies out to spend six days there, coming back two days before the interview that Patrick is dreading.

He has Joe over on the last night of his second trimester, and tries not to let his misery show. They play for a little bit, hunched on Patrick’s floor, but Patrick’s hand feels numb and clumsy even in its new support, and eventually he just gives up, putting his guitar down with a thump that has Joe indignantly removing it from his possession.

“Dude! Don’t abuse the music!”

“I can’t fucking _play_ any music!” Patrick growls, skimming his pick across his living room floor like a stone. It skitters into the overflow of his vinyl collection and gets knocked flat by a copy of the new Prince album. “I can’t move my fat fucking fingers so what is the point?!”

Joe frowns, placing Patrick’s guitar back in its stand by the wall. “You enjoy it.”

“Yeah, well I don’t enjoy messing it up.” Patrick glares at his hands and hopes that Joe will fail to see the bitter tears gathering in his eyes.

“You’ll – it’ll go away when you’re not pregnant anymore,” Joe says tactfully.

“You mean when I have a baby? Some screaming kid keeping me up all hours of the day and night? I might as well not get the movement back at all.” Patrick can’t keep his voice from shaking. He can feel Joe’s panicked stare burning the top of his head through his hat.

“You don’t have to have a kid if you don’t want one that bad,” Joe says, sitting down next to him.

“It’s too late to get rid of it,” Patrick says automatically, because he needs it to be true.

“It’s not too late to… Adopt it out. Find some couple without a baby who’d pay all your hospital bills and take the kid away.”

“Pete wouldn’t want that.” Patrick keeps his head down, picking at a stray fibre on his pants.

“Pete wants you to be happy,” Joe tells him. “Why else would he be here?”

Patrick licks his lips, tasting salt, a reply about how Pete is only there for the baby stuck on his tongue, how he'd been pushing for Patrick to have it and keep it since the very start.

He thinks back to when he first told Pete, then to the day at the abortion clinic, expecting to remember Pete’s intense desire for baby and comes up with nothing. It feels like ages ago. Suddenly he does remember Pete talking to him in the clinic – becoming irritated as Patrick asked him question after question about whether fourteen weeks was too late to get rid of it, whether someone else would want to adopt it or whether he should have this one because he might not be able to have another.

And none of it seems to have Pete’s face lighting up with desire, saying, “I’ll adopt it Patrick!” or subtly indicating that he ought to have the kid.

At what point had Patrick started mistaking support for pressure? Obviously now Pete has been allowed to accept the Patrick _was_ having the baby, he’s just excited and supportive and doing his best. Patrick reels for a minute, wondering when in the narrative he’d let himself start to believe he was doing this for Pete and not the other way around.

“Pete cares about you, dude,” Joe continues when Patrick takes too long to respond. “We all do. We’re a band.”

It all sounds very simple when Joe says it, but it couldn't be more complicated.

 

 

This revelation gives way to a different kind of anxiety, one worse than the desire to blame everything on Pete in the first place: What if Pete doesn’t want the baby? What if all of his enthusiasm is something he’s putting on to support Patrick, and between them they’re going to have a child that Patrick has spent more than three months trying and failing to convince himself he wants to have? What if there is no "between" them? What if Patrick has extrapolated too much from that as well? If he can mistake support for pressure, he can mistake friendship for partnership, and now he doesn't know what to think.

He can't ask Pete, because Pete is hundreds of miles away hanging out with the likes of Ashley Simpson and preparing for a goddamn party with a Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack.

Instead, Patrick just focusses on getting as emotionally fucked as possible. Not intentionally of course, but that doesn’t seem to matter.

He’s gone from kidding himself that Pete is pressuring him into having a kid because he really wants to raise one, to a world where Patrick is a young, single, transsexual parent with a disapproving family and a best friend who loyally supports him through it.

This was always on the cards, but it’d been much easier to lie to himself about it before. Clearly his nightmare is due just after Christmas.

In fact, he does have nightmares about it, the literal kind, except they aren’t like any nightmare he’s ever had before, and they leave him shaking and drenched in sweat.

He’s in his apartment, except it looks wrecked and not in a single-guy-lives-alone way, but in a poverty-stricken-single-parent kind of style. His front door has a crack in it, and when he opens it the hallway is filled with toys, cheap and plastic and broken. He’s exhausted, but he has to make dinner, so he closes the door behind him and picks his way through to the kitchen, and opens his fridge. Instead of the light coming on and illuminating his food, it stays off and his fridge is room temperature and contains an open can of beans and a mostly empty bottle of suspect-looking milk.

He rummages in the cupboards and comes out with a 20 cent package of ramen, and an onion that’s given up on waiting to be eaten and has made a break for life, its green sprout longer than the bulb.

“Mommy, I’m hungry,” Says someone behind him. He doesn’t turn to look at the child.

“Don’t call me that,” He tells it.

“I’m _hungry_ ,” The kid repeats. “I’m hungry I’m hungry I’m hungry!”

“Urgh, Pete!” Patrick calls, opening his drawers in a vague hope of finding either money or food.

“Why are you calling Pete? I thought his band was on a tour?” He's pretty sure the kid is too young to be talking like that, but since he won't look at it, he doesn't know.

“His band?” Patrick feels a little sick.

“Fall Out Boy. I’m hungry I’m hungry, _I’m hungrrryyyyy!”_

“Well I don’t have any food so stop asking!” Patrick snaps.

The kid opens its mouth and lets out a blood curdling scream. Patrick carries on searching without turning around. There’s no more food; he takes out a bowl to microwave the noodles, fills it with water and shoves them in the microwave, but it won’t turn on, and the child is still screaming.

“Shut up!” Patrick demands. “Shut up, shut the fuck up!”

He wheels round to face the kid, but its head is split open at the jaw, the upper half hanging from a hinge right at the back of its skull so that it has a huge, open mouth that takes up most of the circumference of its head, showing dozens of white incisors and the gaping throat from which the sound is coming.

Instead of being terrified, Patrick is still furious. He shakes the creature's little shoulders, harder and harder and the sound doesn’t even waver.

“Shut up!” He shouts, shaking the child so vigorously its head snaps forwards and then back with a sickening crack, going limp at the neck, and the sound stops.

The silence is so sudden it fills his ears with cotton wool and isolates all the noises from outside. His kitchen is very quiet without the sound of a working refrigerator.

Patrick wants to say the child’s name, but he doesn’t know it, only that he is responsible for what has happened, that this thing was his child and now he's murdered it. He shouts Pete’s name instead, screams it, screaming until his voice is the one that fills the room with that terrible, awful sound.

He wakes with sheets soaked to the skin and tries to roll over to bury his head in his pillow, except his belly is in the way and he can’t.  He looks at the bulge with suspicion in the dark, not quite certain that the thing growing inside him isn’t the dead, wide-mouthed creature from his nightmare.

He picks up his phone to text Pete, but it's almost five am, and on the off-chance that Pete has actually managed to sleep, he doesn't want to wake him up. 

Patrick lies down and swallows the taste of vomit, and then he lies awake in bed for five hours before finally accepting that it's not going to happen, and gets up to begin another day of fuck all, home alone in his apartment, without Pete.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings at the end ~  
> This chapter is not proof-read due to technical problems followed by laziness.

Patrick’s fear mixes with his profound disgust for his own bulging, discoloured, shuffling appearance. He’s supposed to be excited, happy, planning bedrooms and baby names, but right now, he resents the baby. Foetus. Fuck, he hates it for what it’s done to him and everything it’s taken – his career, his already shitty appearance, his masculine body, his _music_. Everything he ever gave a fuck about has gone down the drain for some festering, long-term parasite.

All he’s left with when his anger has boiled away is a sense of guilt so crushing that he’s certain he deserves to die for it. No parent could feel like this towards their unborn child, so logic dictates that he isn’t one. His baby doesn’t have a parent, and that feels terrible as well. He’s failing this kid before it’s even born. He doesn’t even _deserve_ a child.

A ring the hallway doorbell breaks him from yet another evening of self-destructive thought, and he goes to the door to find himself staring at several kids  and an exhausted looking woman.

He notices that one of the children is bleeding, and stares at the uninvited guests in shock.

“Trick or treat!” They announce synchronously. One of the children is a zombie; another is a ghost, and the other two are superheroes he could name if he wanted to, but he doesn’t have the energy to care.

Patrick stares at them like what he’s seeing is a real-life omen.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” The woman says, when he fails to procure any treats. “I must've thought your neighbour's pumpkin was for your apartment. Long day. Come on kids, of to the next one, lets stop bothering this pregnant lady.”

And that is it for Patrick. That is beyond _it_ , he has nothing, absolutely nothing left to give to this world.

He slams his door shut and then stares out the peephole until his eyes will no longer focus and the children are no longer in sight.

Then he finds his phone and calls Pete; no response. It’s obviously Halloween, he’s probably preparing for the party if it’s not already started.

Patrick calls Joe then, because he has no one else to talk to. He picks up on the fourth ring.

“What’s up, man?”

“I want it out,” Patrick spits down the phone.

Joe doesn’t reply for a moment. “You what?”

“I want it _out_! I want it gone! I don’t care if they have to cut it out, I don’t care if it kills me. I want this fucking thing GONE OUT OF MY BODY!” Patrick screams in a way that he hasn’t since he committed his voice to music.

“Okay man,” Joe sounds panicked this time, not the same kind of unease he’d shown at Patrick crying. The kind of panic that shakes his voice up and raises it half an octave, like it had when Pete had tried to kill himself. “Calm down.”

“I _can’t_! I need it out!” It’s Patrick’s voice that’s rising now, climbing into his falsetto range and dropping at unexpected moments. “I can’t get hold of Pete! I can’t take another day of this, I can’t!”

“Breathe, Patrick,” Joe is saying, but Patrick _can’t_ breathe.

“I’ve left it too late, oh my God, why did I leave it so late?” Patrick sobs, voice totally outside his own control. “What am I gonna do? If they won’t get rid of it what am I going to do?”

He claws at his own skin, at his scalp, knocking his hat to the floor, at his belly as though finger nails are going to be able to do what needs to be done. He must sound like a lunatic over the phone to Joe, but that’s the least of Patrick’s problems – his main one being that he actually _is_ a lunatic right now, apparently unable to stop himself gagging and groaning in horror and despair.

Next door bangs on the wall. Patrick doesn’t respond.

Without thinking about it, he’s storming through to his kitchen. His knife rack is just there and the only knife clean and in it is a large cook’s knife, about nine inches long.

He can hear Joe talking on the phone, trying to get his attention, and ends the call. He has no attention to spare.

The knife is a good one. His mom gave it to him when he moved out, saying that everyone needs at least one sharp knife in their house. Patrick hasn’t ever really done it justice. It’s sliced a few tomatoes here and there, cut a few pizzas when the pizza wheel was nowhere to be found.

Joe calls him back, but he doesn’t pick upl.

It’s too late to get an abortion at the hospital. If he cuts it out, he’ll probably be arrested. It’ll be public. He’ll be locked away, or put in an institution. If he kills himself, it doesn’t matter; he won’t have to deal with the baby, and he won’t have to deal with the fall out either. It’s a win win.

But he’s still going to cut it out. He wants that thing out of him even if it’s the last thing he does. Wants his association with it to end so that at the very least, he won’t be buried with it.

The knife has a good weight in his hand, a nice balance to it. He thinks, anyway. He’s not a weapons expert. But he’s confident it’ll do what he needs it to do.

He pulls his shirt up, and then rips it aside when it catches on his fat, overhanging uterus, and grips the knife with the blade pressed against his skin. It’s cold for a few seconds, and then begins to heat up.

His phone buzzes again and he jumps, nicking the skin below his belly button deep enough to draw blood. “Fuck!” He swears, fumbling with the phone to end Joe’s call.

He can’t seem to do it one-handed, and has to flip it open with his chin.

_Incoming call… Pete_

Patrick presses the green button on the seventh ring, the last one before it goes to voicemail, and treats Pete to thirty seconds of his ragged breathing.

“Patrick? Trick are you alright? What’s happening? Are you okay?” There are people in the background to Pete’s call, but it doesn’t sound like the party has started yet.

“N – No.” Patrick says eventually, chest seizing, trying to stop the words from ever getting out.

“What’s wrong? Has something happened?” There’s a scuffling noise at the end of the phone, and then the background noise stops, like Pete has locked himself in a room.

“I – I need it out,” Patrick chokes down the phone, trying not to sob or hyperventilate and failing on both counts. His voice breaks into an ugly whine. “I need it gone, Pete! I need it out and, and – “

He can’t finish, he isn’t even sure what he’d been about to say.

“Fuck. Okay, I’m coming. Patrick, please don’t do anything stupid,” Pete tries to make him promise, like Patrick has so many times in reverse.

“You don’t need to come,” Patrick says, sounding utterly unconvincing. He drops the knife onto the granite worktop and scrambles to pick it up before it falls off.

“What’s that noise?” Pete’s voice catches in fear. “Patrick, what was that?”

“I need it out!” Patrick pleads. Blood is beading along the length of the cut.

“Where are you? Patrick, talk to me. Are you in your apartment?”

“Yes,” Patrick tells him, because what can Pete do? He’s 2000 miles away.

“What are you doing right now?”

“Nothing.” He’s no longer pleading. He doesn’t feel much of anything anymore. He feels like something that only very vaguely exists, like a mist or a spiritual sensation.

“Patrick, I need more than one word,” Patrick can hear activity in Pete’s background again, people talking, doors slamming. “I’m gonna come home.”

A bang has Patrick dropping both the phone and the knife with a yelp and losing his balance.

“What the fuck Patrick?” Joe is shouting in alarm. He kicks the knife away from Patrick while Patrick is too stunned by his sudden presence to do anything about it, and hauls him back against the counter.

Patrick leans his weight into Joe, trying to push him out of the way to reach his phone.

“Fuck no, you are not picking up that knife! What are you, crazy?” Joe grips him tightly by the shoulder and pins him back.

Patrick can only reach out for the phone while Joe panics and inspects the minor wound on his stomach.

“Stop it, what the hell are you doing?” Joe sounds more upset than angry, still resisting Patrick’s dead weight flopping into him.

But Patrick’s explained this enough times, and he just wants to reach his cell now, to hear Pete speak. He’s forgotten how to say this though, or to say anything at all, and just bleats sadly in the direction of his phone.

“Dude, we’ve gotta get you to hospital,” Joe pulls Patrick through to the living room and forces him down onto the couch.

“I don’t want to go to the hospital,” Patrick finds his voice again.

Joe explains why he has to go again and again, but Patrick’s head is swimming with fears he can’t vocalise – what if he goes and they section him? What if everyone finds out what he is? What if he goes and they won’t take it out of him but they keep him under observation so he can’t do it himself, and he’s _forced_ to carry the baby like a farm animal being bred?

He’s still begging Joe not to make him go as Joe buckles his seatbelt in the car. “Come on, Patrick. You’re gonna be okay.”

Joe puts the child lock on, and drives him to the emergency room.

It takes a lot of negotiation to get Patrick put in a private room to wait for a doctor. It probably took a lot last time, Patrick thinks vaguely, but obviously he’d been unconscious for most of it. He waits in Joe’s car, driven right up to the curb outside the reception and illegally parked there because Joe doesn’t want to leave him further away.

They give Patrick a bed and hand him a gown and tell him they’ll send someone through as soon as there’s a doctor free.

“I’ll wait outside while you get changed,” Joe tells him.

Patrick sits on the bed alone in the little room, and manages to get one shoe off before Joe returns ten minutes later.

“Come on, dude. Let me help,” Joe pulls off his other shoe and his socks.

“Pete,” Patrick says numbly.

“I’ll go outside and call him as soon as I can, okay?” Joe unfolds the gown and lays it out next to Patrick on the bed.

Patrick manages to undo his own fly, motivated mostly by the idea that Joe might try to do it for him if he doesn’t. He kicks his pants off but keeps his boxers on.

Joe pulls off his t-shirt, and Patrick has nothing on underneath. He crosses his hands over his chest before Joe can see the scars, but then gives up and covers his stomach instead, because somehow that’s the part of him that feels the most wrong, the most naked. It’s probably ironic that Joe gets to see him like this before Pete does.

“You have to put your arms through,” Joe tells him, holding the gown up between his own line of sight and Patrick’s body.

“I have to call Pete,” Patrick says, as soon as he’s done poppering the gown shut behind his own back. It pulls on the scab on his stomach, but he doesn’t want Joe doing it if he can help it.

“I’ll do it.”

“And my mom,” Patrick adds.

“Will you be okay for five minutes? You know how they are about phones in hospitals,” Joe asks.

“I’m fine,” Patrick lies.

Joe gives him a look that calls bullshit, but doesn’t say it aloud. “I’ll be five minutes. Ten at the most. Promise you’ll stay in here?”

“Okay,” Patrick says.

When Joe leaves, he sinks back into the bed, listening to his own ragged breathing and the background noise of the hospital outside his door, and tries ineffectually not to panic as something moves inside of him.

 

Patrick’s sister arrives first, before any doctor has been to see him. He’s still crying, and Joe is still standing nearby, patting him occasionally.

“What happened?” Megan asks, pushing Joe aside.

Patrick squints at her through his itching eyes to check if she’s surprised, and she is, but he can’t tell if it’s his belly or the state he’s in. “I don’t want to be like this anymore, I don’t want to be a parent,” He begins to tell her, but a doctor has followed her in and interrupts him.

“I’m going to give you an injection,” He says without preamble, filling a small needle from a phial. “It’s corticosteroids to help the baby.”

Patrick flinches. He so doesn’t want a baby to be a part of the equation right now.

“To help it what?” His sister stares at him in confusion.

“To help it breathe after the birth. The mother will need to be assessed first, but these need as much time to work as possible to we need to give them now.”

Patrick himself could do with some help breathing. His heart feels like it’s battering against his ribcage, slamming against his sternum to get out, and his throat feels as though it’s being squeezed.

“Patrick?” Joe is talking to him. “Take a deep breath.”

Patrick shakes his head. Joe obviously doesn’t seem to realise that he’s literally dying, that he can’t breathe. Patrick’s chest hurts, and he tries to pull the collar of the gown back to look at himself, but his hands are shaking like he’s having some kind of seizure.

Megan is asking what he needs, and Joe is moving Patrick’s trembling hands from where they’re picking at the gown. Patrick slaps him away, shielding his face with his arms. He doesn’t want either of them there, doesn’t want an audience.

Instead, more doctors arrive to look at him, pulling at his limbs to attach him to the machines around the bed. Someone does something to his arm that hurts and he yanks it back, struggling to get more air.

Finally they back off, leaving the room entirely until only Patrick, Joe and Megan are left. Patrick pulls the monitor off his finger. Megan picks it up off the floor and holds it back out to him as though he’s in any fit state to put it back on, and he closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to see anything.

“Patrick, if the doctors want you to keep that thing on you really should,” Megan is trying to persuade him, but Patrick isn’t really listening. He can hear arguing from outside the door. “Patrick, is there something I can do? Mom’s on her way and so is Kevin.”

The last thing he wants is all his friends and family gathered round him like he’s on his deathbed, but since he’s decently sure that he is and his throat has stopped working, he has no choice but to lie and wait for them to coalesce.

The doctors come  back in just as his mom arrives.

“Patrick!” She exclaims.

Patrick keeps his eyes shut tight and his head shielded by his hands as medical staff surround him.

“We would like to give… _him_ a sedative,” Somebody says.

“What for?” His mother demands immediately, launching herself into full-on _mom_ mode. “What’s happened? What are you giving him?”

“We want to give him diazepam to help calm him down,” Says the same doctor, stepping into Patrick’s line of sight. He blocks her face out with his fingers and leans away from the conversation and into Joe, who pats him once and then pulls his hand back as though the gesture could cause something more to go wrong with Patrick.

“I thought you couldn’t take that when you’re pregnant?” Joe asks. This makes Patrick retch and Patricia spin round to face Joe as though she’s just realised he’s there. Megan holds something rough against his cheek, preparing to catch anything that might come out of his mouth.

“Never mind if he’s pregnant!” She yells. Patrick puts his thumbs into his ears and tries to block out the noise. “He’s not going to be pregnant for much longer, is he? You told me he was ready to cut it out himself on the phone!”

Hearing her say it makes Patrick want to rebel, to shout at her to shut up and back off and that it’s _his_ baby, but he’s unable to do more than gasp pathetically for air, feeling bile burn the back of his throat. The urge passes quickly, giving way to some kind of acceptance.

Her word is apparently enough for the hospital staff, because within a minute or so, a small blue pill is handed to him alongside a glass of water, which he chokes and gags at until it’s taken away and replaced by a woman with a syringe.

“Just a small scratch,” She tells him, and stabs him in the arm with her needle.

He’s pretty sure that this is Valium and expects it to work immediately, but he feels no different. He retches again, hard enough that he throws up a little into a cardboard tray in Megan’s hand. He retches again and again, trying in vain to catch enough breath to swallow and stop his head from spinning, but his throat closes on nothing and he coughs like he’s going to hack up a lung.

The noises of distress from his mother and sister and the quiet mutterings of surprised horror from Joe tell him that they weren’t expecting him to get worse either. His mom puts a hand on his chest, and he pushes the three of them away, disgusted in his own skin and unable to bear them touching him, watching him. It’s not just the baby he wants out; he wants to crawl out of himself as well.

He slaps at the people around him until they touch him no longer, but he can still feel them watching, staring at him, judging him for his weakness, for not having got an abortion earlier, for ruining the band over nothing. It makes him feel sick, wishing the lumpy mattress would swallow him and send him down to hell where at least he would be out of sight.

He spits sour tasting fluid over himself, obviously suitably disgusting if his mother’s soft sob is anything to go by, and presses his fingers into his eyelids until his eyeballs ache with patterns and stars.

Something rolls in his belly, and Patrick wishes he’d been less of a coward with the knife.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Self harm, suicide ideation, dysphoria; issues of bodily autonomy.
> 
> So sorry this has taken so long! Life has been hectic and everything when wrong when I tried to upload from my tablet - hope you folks are still reading!


	14. Chapter 14

Slowly, Patrick begins to calm down.

His pounding heart finds its normal rhythm, feeling lethargic by comparison to a few minutes before; he can breathe again, deep, cleansing breaths, like a well-needed sigh. Patrick’s anxiety dissipates over a few minutes. Nothing seems quite so urgent, and after a minute more, he no longer cares how ridiculous he must look. The people in the room fade from an oppressive force to a mild irritation, and then a mere presence around him.

He feels drunk and very relaxed, and he can’t seem to care that he’s wearing an open-backed gown that is drenched in sweat.

His mom is talking to a doctor, probably the same one who had been speaking a few minutes ago. Patrick doesn’t mind.

“The operating theatre really needs to be free for emergencies,” The doctor is saying. “It’s Halloween and it’s one of our busiest-“

“This _is_ an emergency!” Patricia shouts. “Get him into theatre now!”

“Don’t worry about it mom,” Patrick says, his voice rather distant. It can wait till morning. “I can’t go in before Pete gets here.”

“Why would you need _Pete_ there?” She asks shrilly, not turning to face him.

“Pete’s very important,” Patrick hears himself say. Joe pats him on the shoulder again.

“Not compared to your health he isn’t! You need to do this _now_!” She pleads with the doctor.

“I’ll wait till Pete gets here and I’ll ask him what I should do,” Patrick slurs serenely, certain that this is the best course of action.

“You can’t let Pete decide!” His mom squawks in alarm. “Patrick, you’re suicidal!”

“Mom!” Megan cuts in. “Just let him wait, he’s high off his head, there’s no point arguing with him.”

“Pete will know what to do,” Patrick tries to lift his head to assure his mother, but it feels very heavy indeed. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow and it’ll all get sorted out.”

Joe pats him again, probably out of relief, like one consoling a toddler at the end of a long tantrum.

Convinced that nothing really matters, and unable to bring himself to move or care, Patrick falls asleep instantly.

 

 

By the early hours of the next morning, the diazepam has worn off and Patrick doesn’t feel like talking to Pete is going to sort anything at all. He’s still desperate for Pete to arrive, watching the second hand of the clock in the room tick by tediously slowly and trying not to descend into another panic attack, which is easier said than done. His heart beats erratically, speeding up and slowing down, and occasionally he’s absolutely certain that it stops altogether. He can feel sweat pouring out of him at such a rate that he has to ask repeatedly for a glass of water and his bed is as wet as it might’ve been if he’d just given up and peed in it.

“How’re you doing?” Joe asks him when he notices Patrick has woken up. It’s just past 3 am, and his mom and sister are both asleep in chairs at the foot and to the left of his bed.

“I want Pete,” Patrick swallows loudly.

Joe stretches his back, spine popping. “He’ll be here soon. His flight gets in at 3:15.”

“Do you think I ruined his Halloween party?” Patrick asks, wiping his sweaty hands on the ugly blanket of his bed.

“Probably,” Joe yawns. “I don’t think he’ll care. Go back to sleep.”

But Patrick can’t. He closes his eyes so that Joe doesn’t question him, and listens to his heart thundering in his chest, blood rushing in the vessels in his ears. He’s sure his breathing must give him away, can’t keep from almost panting, but Joe says nothing more and neither does anyone else. He cracks one eye to watch the clock tick through the seconds and counts down to the time Pete’s flight is due to land. After that, with no approaching marker, time slows right down to a crawl that only makes his pulse and breathing feel faster. He’s breathing once every two seconds, and his heart is beating almost twice a second. He’s surprised it doesn’t set an alarm off. No matter how fast Patrick’s body is going, time keeps a relentlessly slow pace.

Something twitches and he looks down in time to see something moving beneath his skin, the thing inside him moving so forcefully that he can see the motion through the gown. It makes Patrick’s skin crawl, actually and metaphorically in disgust.

At 3:48, the door opens and Patrick sits straight up as Pete peeks round the frame to check he has the right room. He closes it quietly behind him and tiptoes over to the bed.

“Pete!” Patrick grabs him by the collar of his bat-covered hoodie and pulls him close to his face, breath ragged and panicked, making Pete stumble and almost fall on Megan, asleep in her chair.

“Whoa! It’s okay, Patrick.” Pete steadies himself with one hand and takes Patrick’s wrist in the other, as though he’s going to try and detach it from his clothing, except he doesn’t.

“There’s too many people here,” Patrick rushes to tell him. “Make my mom go away!”

He says this loud enough that his mother shifts in her own chair, and Pete glances back at her in alarm.

“Shhh, Patrick. Go to sleep, we can make her go in the morning, okay?” Pete whispers back.

“I need to talk to you,” Patrick presses on. “I don’t know what to do. The baby, I, it’s too late, but it’s not late enough, and I tried to – to – but Joe stopped it, and now the hospital, my mom wants them to do it and –“

“Patrick, you’re not making any sense,” Pete cuts him off. “You’re too tired for this, we can talk tomorrow.”

“Not time, the operation, my  mom, so I have to decide –“

“No one’s going to do anything before you decide.  We’ll talk in the morning, Trick,” Pete toes off his shoes and leaves them next to Megan’s on the floor. “I promise.”

He lifts himself onto the bed, crawling deftly over Patrick towards the side of the bed where Joe is resting his forehead and settles into the space behind Patrick, urging him to lie back down.

Patrick goes, drawing Pete’s arm across his chest to make sure he knows if Pete moves anywhere in the night. “Sorry I ruined Halloween.”

“It’s okay. Sorry I wasn’t here.”

Pete snuggles up against his back and Patrick bunches up the pillow beneath his head. The baby kicks him, hard in the top of his stomach, against Pete’s arm, and Pete makes a pleased sound. “I felt that one,” He says, and then abruptly closes his mouth.

Patrick sighs sadly, closing his eyes. “Me too.”

 

 

When Patrick wakes up, people are milling around his room, watching him, and none of them are Pete. “Where’s Pete?” He asks immediately, before he can even remember how he got here.

“He went for a piss,” Joe tells him, packing his things together.

“But I need to pee as well,” Patrick says, sounding a little hurt before he remembers that this isn’t an activity he wants to share with anyone, even Pete.

“You’ll have to wait for Pete, then, because he’s in your en suite,” Megan is still to the left of his bed. His mom is still at the foot of it, where he doesn’t want her to be, and there are two doctors in scrubs in the room as well, one checking a machine behind him and the other talking quietly to his mother, making him suddenly aware of what the situation is and how uncomfortable he is with it.

He wants the doctor to realise he’s awake and come to him instead, but he can’t say this aloud and instead a wave of anxious nausea rolls through him, so severely that Megan offers him another cardboard bowl to throw up in.

He turns away from her, grabbing Joe’s arm and accidentally looking down and getting an eyeful of himself, which only makes the nausea worse.

When Pete unlocks the door, and steps dishevelled into the room, Patrick stares at him in wide-eyed panic until he comes along to attend to him. “Morning.”

“There are too many people,” Patrick repeats. “Make them go away!”

“Hey, I’m leaving,” Joe picks up his bag. “It’s family only from now, apparently.”

Patrick grimaces at Pete. They both know that Joe isn’t one of the “too many”; in fact, if Patrick could just have all the members of his band in the room, he would. But Joe gives his shoulder a single squeeze and slips out the door.

Last night he’d wanted his mom, because his mind had been made up and he’d known she wouldn’t stop him; this morning, his head isn’t so clear and he can tell she’s going to make deciding impossible for him.

“I can’t be the one to ask them, Trick,” Pete says nervously. Patrick feels a flash of irritation – Pete’s anxieties about being here can’t possibly live up to his.

“Mom,” Patrick manages. She looks up at him from her conversation with the doctor. “Can you… Go away for a bit, please?”

“What?” She looks at him as though he’s said something she doesn’t understand, but suspects to be outrageous.

“Can you go away and come back in a few hours?” His voice becomes quieter and quieter, until he finishes on a whisper. “I want to talk to the doctors on my own.”

“I can _not_!” She sprays saliva over the bed in her outrage. “In a few hours you’ll be in surgery! Am I not even allowed to see you off?!”

Patrick doesn’t say anything. Pete chances a glance up at Megan’s blank expression, and then fixes his gaze on a small hole in Patrick’s blanket.

“You _will_ be in surgery,” Patricia says warningly, and it feels like Patrick is nine and surgery is a club he’s signed up for but doesn’t want to commit to.

“Can you please just go?” Patrick can’t even look at her, can’t look at his sister. He follows Pete’s eyes to watch the same tiny hole.

“And _he_ gets to stay, when I don’t?” She asks, gesturing at Pete. “He isn’t even _family_ , he’s not-“

“Yes he is!” Patrick snaps. He grabs Pete’s wrist, as though he might be taken away if Patrick doesn’t hold on tight. “Get out!”

“He is not! I’m your mother-“

His mom’s bellowing is cut off by someone saying, “I’m sorry ma’am, but I’m going to have to ask you to step outside.”

Everyone looks towards the door, where Dr Whyte is standing, clipboard in hand, wearing an apparently genuine smile. Patrick wonders how she pulls it off.

It looks for a moment as if Patricia is going to have a standoff with his ob-gyn in the ER, but with a glare and some muttered curse-words, she relinquishes her seat, and Megan follows her out of the room with a backwards glance at Patrick.

Dr Whyte smiles widely at him like she hasn’t just mediated something extremely awkward. “Hello there Mr Stump, it seems you’ve had quite an eventful time these last few weeks.”

“Yeah,” Croaks Patrick dully. Dr Whyte reminds him of yet another distant aunt commenting on his recent tour at an event full of extended family. Except the words they exchange won’t be the inconsequential small talk he’s used to. The weight of decision making presses down on his chest.

“So, what are we going to do about that then?” she asks. “I see from your records that you came in requesting a caesarean last night.”

“I… Don’t know.” Patrick swallows the lump clogging his throat.

“Perhaps you’d like me to take you through your options first?” Dr Whyte presses, tapping her clipboard on the foot of the bed.

Patrick closes his eyes, and behind the lids he can see the woman in the abortion clinic. His stomach rolls. Pete steadies him with a hand on his shoulder, and Patrick stares at it. There’s something black under Pete’s nails, but it looks like make-up rather than dirt. He wonders what brand it is.

“Patrick?”

“What do you think I should do?” Patrick asks Pete’s hand.

“There’s no _should_ , Patrick. You should do what’s right for you.” Whyte says pragmatically.

“And how the hell am I supposed to know what that is? Just tell me what _you_ think!” Patrick is already breathing heavily again. He watches Pete’s grip on his shoulder tighten and doesn’t look up at him or the doctor. He isn’t shouting, but he isn’t not shouting either. Perhaps she will be angry at him.

“I think… That you’ve been very depressed and anxious during this entire pregnancy, and you haven’t received any treatment for it,” Dr Whyte replies, and Patrick blinks at Pete’s hand; he’s grown so used to ambiguous, uncertain responses that a genuine answer catches him unaware. “If I were you, I would hold off today and take the medicine I prescribe you, and if you don’t start feeling any better within the next month or things get even worse, come back and get the c-section, and decide what you want to do with the baby in the meantime. But that’s just me.”

Patrick rocks a little, looking up for just a second to gauge Pete’s reaction. His face is anxious, tired.

Patrick supposes it’s a reasonable proposal. It involves putting off a decision, which is totally his style. He wants to accept straight away, but he’s scared she won’t trust his judgement if he does, and tries to formulate the questions he’s obviously meant to be asking. “What drugs are you going to give me?”

“Buspirone, which is anti-anxiety but safer in pregnancy than diazepam, although it takes a while to start working, and probably some kind of anti-depressant. I’ll give you a small supply of diazepam for emergencies as well.”

“But you just said it wasn’t safe in pregnancy?”

Dr Whyte smiles sympathetically at him and says, “No, but it’s definitely safer than performing a caesarean on yourself with a kitchen knife.”

Patrick can hear his mom shouting at his sister in the corridor. His head is full of cotton wool, and he can think of no more questions, apart from to give Pete a doubtful look. “Okay.” Maybe there is no right decision.

“I’ll go and write your scripts; I’d like you to continue taking the steroids, just in case,” Dr Whyte says, turning to leave but stopping just inside the door. “What about… Your mother?”

Patrick grimaces; every moment he puts off seeing her will make it worse and he knows it. “I just _can’t_ , not right now,” he whispers to Pete’s arm.

She nods and closes the door behind her, finally leaving Patrick alone with Pete for the first time in days.

As soon as the door is shut, a jagged, serrated sigh escapes Patrick and he finally meets and holds Pete’s bloodshot eyes. “I’m sorry,” He whispers. “For all this.”

“Dude,” Pete shakes his head, pushing him to lay back down. “You don’t have to be sorry. I’d rather be here than some stupid party.”

Patrick licks his lips, tasting the metallic outline of his own teeth where they broke skin. “I’m scared of having a baby.”

“You’ll be anaesthetized. There won’t be any pain,” Pete rests a hand over the swell of Patrick’s belly, thumbing it protectively through the gown.

“That’s not what I mean,” Patrick grumbles, alone with Pete and the hollow knowledge that he is a terrible person. He’s still bursting to pee, but ironically this is the one time he can’t bear looking down in the bathroom. If he’d been born with a dick, none of this would’ve happened. It must be someone’s cruel joke, a reminder that nothing will ever go right for him. And here’s Pete, trying to ignore that it’s all gone to shit, time and time again.

“I’m not trying to ignore it,” Pete’s voice is rough, and Patrick jumps. “It’s just… You heard what she said. You’ve been depressed this whole time, and it’s like, you can’t see the wood for the trees. All you can see is the pain and you can’t tell all the ways it’s gone right for you because you’re so fixated…”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Patrick grits out, already aware that his heart is beating faster. “I’m so selfish and self-obsessed I can’t tell that my life is better than it could be?”

“No!” Pete takes a step away from him and Patrick immediately begins to panic. Pete was supposed to make this all better, and now he’s moving away. “The _medication_ is to make you feel better. That other stuff is just supposed to keep you feeling that way.”

“I don’t want to be a parent, Pete,” Patrick cuts in, and Pete falls silent immediately. “I don’t want to be – to be up all night changing diapers, arranging baby sitters, I don’t wanna have to stay home looking after some kid, while you and Andy and Joe all get to go out and be _fucking rockstars_. I don’t wanna have a four year old keeping me home when you meet the girl of your dreams or a five year old wanting my attention when you marry her. I don’t want to be trapped on my own with a child when you’re out living your lives without me! I don’t want to be on my own, I can’t do what my mom did!”

The machine attached to Patrick’s finger beeps ominously. Pete’s face falls. He pushes Megan’s chair aside and clambers back onto the bed beside Patrick, wedging himself between Patrick’s bump and the bed frame. He tries to get his head above Patrick’s and fails, so he talks into Patrick’s neck instead. “You’re not gonna be alone, Trick. We’re not gonna leave you behind.” He swallows loudly. “D’you remember that time when I came back drunk? Or when you asked me if I’d look after the kid on my own if you couldn’t handle it? I can’t promise anything else, but I promise you won’t be on your own. I’ll totally change my half of the diapers and everything, even the really gross ones.”

Patrick holds his breath, trying not to sob and tilts his head to prevent a tear dripping off his chin onto Pete’s forehead. It catches Pete’s nose instead.

Holding his breath is a mistake, as the beeping noise only becomes louder and more urgent, obviously beyond the capacity of hospital staff to ignore any longer, as a nurse bursts in, followed by his mother who is still trailed by a fresh-faced doctor looking alarmed.

“Please, Ms Stumph, I’ve been told not to let you –“

“Nonsense!” His mom snaps making a bee-line for Patrick’s bed. “I’ve told you, they’re not together! I’m the mother.”

Patrick dries his tears on the back of his bare arm quickly. The doctor and nurse look from him, to Pete with his head tucked under Patrick’s chin, and then back to Patricia in unison.

“Of course not, Ms Stumph,” The nurse says placatingly, giving Patrick an apologetic but knowing smile as she turns off the beeping machine. “Having a bit of a panic are we? Do you want me to get a more senior doctor? I’m sure I saw Dr Whyte around here somewhere.”

Patrick shakes his head, he only really wants privacy, but his mom says, “Yes! Get someone here who can sort out this nonsense at once!”

“It’s okay,” Patrick sighs, giving in. “Let her stay.”

Patricia gives the doctor a righteous look and keeps it up until he backs out the door, followed shortly by the nurse. “Patrick,” She says, pulling up Megan’s chair and talking as though they’re alone and she isn’t having to sit straight upright to peer over Pete’s shoulder to see him.

“Patrick, sweetie. I know everything’s very difficult right now, and I haven’t been around as much as I should. And I know you’re scared of having the caesarian, but I’ve done a lot of research, and I know it could survive if you had it now. I’ve spoken to… Well, I went to see an adoption consultant last week,” She ignores Patrick’s look of stunned outrage and the stiffness in Pete’s shoulders, “And they have couples lining up who would be able to take the baby as soon as it’s out, even with the time in the neonatal unit. You could choose the parents you want, you could even get an open adoption, so you could get updates on how the baby is doing, and maybe even visit if you wanted to. Patrick?”

Pete is rigid against his side, face closed, watching the wall, but Patrick is sure that all of Pete’s attention is on him.

“I – I don’t know,” He says at last. “I – the doctor said she wanted to give me anti-depressants, and if I could carry on a little longer, it would be good, for the baby’s lungs.”

He can feel her watching him, like she can see all the way through him to the machines against the wall. Patrick wants to shrink back and hide behind Pete, but there’s too much Patrick and too little Pete for this to present a viable option.

He hears her take a deep breath. “…I’ll tell the agency you might not be delivering as soon as we thought, then.”

“Mom! I – I might not – I might… Might keep it.”

Patricia sits as still as Pete in the chair, shocked into disbelieving silence, the way she’d been when he’d first come out to her. Pete rests his forehead on Patrick’s cheek, just below his ear. His mom seems to gather herself. “I’d still like you to talk to the consultant, that way, everything’s ready and – “

“No!” Patrick flattens himself down in the bed so that she has to glare at him through Pete’s skull.

“Patrick! Even you just said ‘ _might_ ’! What do you plan on doing if you decide _not_ to keep it?!”

“If we decide not to keep it we can see the damn consultant once we’ve decided!” Patrick’s voice shakes, and so does the rest of his body, in anger or fear or panic, he doesn’t know.

“ _We?_ Who is _we_?” Patricia’s voice rises half an octave with a dangerous edge.

Patrick purses his lips and turns his head away. He never got to finish that conversation with Pete.

Pete finally shifts, sitting up and twisting round to face Patricia, resting one hand possessively just above Patrick’s distended belly.

Patrick doesn’t watch them stare each other down, doesn’t move or speak as his mother stands slowly from her chair and picks up her bag.

“I see,” She hisses, and with that she leaves, pushing the door open so hard that it slams against the wall outside.

It bangs shut and leaves them alone in the room.

“Are you okay?” Pete asks weakly, trying to push his face into Patrick’s field of vision.

“Fine,” Patrick gulps, and when Pete doesn’t seem appeased, he carries on, “I’m fine! I’m used to it by now. She should be – I don’t know, organising me a baby shower or something, or getting out books of baby names, or – or – I don’t know, but what does it matter? What does it even matter if _she’s_ out there looking up adoption agencies, while I’m in here worrying about support?! It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m fine.”

“She’s just being over protective, Trick.” Pete gives up on getting him to face him and tries to stroke Patrick’s hair, but he jerks his head away.

“Well she’s doing a damn good job of it! She’s being so over protective she’s abandoned me!”

“She hasn’t,” Pete smooths the blankets over him, because it’s harder for Patrick to knock him away with his arms trapped beneath a sheet. “She’ll be back here tomorrow, waiting to see how you are.”

“I don’t want to be here tomorrow!” Patrick huffs. “I just want to go home.”


	15. Chapter 15

 Patrick spends another four days under observation at the hospital. His mom comes to visit on all of them, but each stay is brief and they don’t talk about the baby. Megan and Kevin both visit, but Patrick can barely look at them in case they bring it up, and they too leave quickly.

Pete brings him new lyrics to look at, and they’re good, but Patrick can’t concentrate on anything, not even music and especially not himself. They talk about mundane things to avoid having to focus on the hospital, the baby bump or Patrick’s mom.

“So, no new girlfriends, then?” Patrick asks towards the end of a long lucid period, when all other subjects seem to have been exhausted.

Pete blinks at him a few times, like he’s surprised by the question. “Uh, no. Been kinda busy, and I hate to bring it up, but… You’re the only one of us who keeps his relationships secret.”

Patrick sighs and tries to find a more comfortable position. There aren’t any; he’s been in the bed too long and his belly prevents him lying comfortably anyhow, but it covers his guilt for a few seconds. “That’s a first for our main serial monogamist.”

“It would be if I wasn’t already married to you,” Pete says, his artificial off-handedness palpable.

“You don’t have to stay,” Patrick tells him, wondering whether he could get another dose of sedatives without Pete noticing. “You should be out and seeing people, I’ll be fine.”

Pete gives him a piercing look. His eyelids are bruised with exhaustion, but even his blurry eyes can see right through Patrick’s crap. “Shut up.”

Patrick does. He wants to curl up and face away from Pete, but he can’t, so he looks out the window at his foot-of-a-scraper view instead.

When Pete goes out to get coffee, Patrick shoves his lyrics off the edge of the bed so he can try and lay on his side.

Something entitled _Bang the Doldrums_ catches the air and floats a little way apart from the others on the fall down, and Patrick stares blankly at the paper.

It’s a breakup song, like a lot of Pete’s lyrics. Except that it isn’t. He hangs off the bed and picks the page up.

 _Best friends,_  
Ex-friends till the end,  
Better off as lovers,  
And not the other way around

Patrick suppresses a little thrill of shame for hoping the song is about him.

_You’re wrong  
Are we all wrong?_

It easily could be. Patrick feels pretty wrong. Everything is wrong right now.

_This is a love song in my own way  
Happily ever after – below the waist_

Patrick feels a little sick. Pete’s writing taunts him, he can almost hear a tune in between the words.

Pete had once said he was gay above the waist.

Patrick shouldn’t think like that, shouldn’t twist the lyrics into what he apparently wants them to be.

Patrick is, by some strange measure, only gay above the waist. He doesn’t have a dick, right? Pete had just said it was the dick thing he couldn’t handle.

Patrick doesn’t even _want_ to be with someone who can only rationalise it by saying he was a woman below the waist. He doesn’t want to be someone’s exception.

But he’d take happily ever after, right now, and maybe not because he likes Pete that much, but because he really needs a stable relationship, with someone more able to raise a child than he is. The idea of Pete being that person is really laughable. Or it had been, four months ago.

The door opens.

Patrick jumps in shock, shoving the lyrics away from himself and into the air. They flutter down again to land neatly on top of the rest, as though placed there in a pile. His heart hammers loudly as Pete steps through and the machine next to him lets out a little scream in response.

“Hey – do you want me to call the nurse?” Pete asks when he sees Patrick’s face.

Patrick’s whole body is thrumming with nervous energy, he can feel every blood cell in every capillary pulsing and electric. He nods mechanically. “Yeah… Probably a good idea.”

 

 

**_Week 27_ **

_Your baby is now in her third trimester. She sucks her thumb to strengthen her jaw muscles for suckling, and if she is startled by a loud noise outside your belly, she might cry._

The door creaks and Patrick looks up to see Pete watching him.

“Hey. What’re you reading?” Pete asks.

“She’s the size of a cauliflower,” Patrick holds up the pregnancy book.

“She?”

Patrick shrugs. “The baby is always a she in the books.”

“From what I’ve heard the baby is always a vegetable. You need to rest, Trick.” Pete closes the door behind him and makes like he’s going to tuck Patrick in. It’s been two days since Patrick got home, drugged after another night of observation and two psychiatric evaluations, with a bag of expensive medicine, the prospect of an obscene hospital bill and repeated assurances that if he feels too tempted by the idea of more self-surgery, he’ll call an ambulance.

Patrick shuffles to the far side of the bed, still holding the book. “I can’t rest now, I need to make a birthing plan, and I have to find something to wear for that interview –“

“You’re not _doing_ an interview –“

“And we haven’t bought any formula, or a crib.”

“Patrick,” Pete tries to gently tug the book from Patrick’s hands. “It can wait till tomorrow.”

“I’m gonna be a terrible parent,” Patrick ignores him, clutching the book like a prized possession. “I don’t even have a name for it. What if my – if I get infected and it dies? What if I should’ve just let them do a C-section when we were there and now I’ve killed it?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Pete finally wrests the book from his grip and closes it with a snap. “They wouldn’t have let you leave if they thought something bad was going to happen.”

It takes yet another dose of the dangerous diazepam to convince Patrick that he hasn’t cause his own baby’s impending doom.

 

 

Something bad was going to happen though, to Patrick’s finances, because the next day he sees the statement from the hospital and loses his shit.

**Estimated Patient Balance Due…...$5900.02**

He spends the next three days in a medicated haze until, with the aid of his anti-depressant cocktail, he is sufficiently recovered from the shock to his bank account to damage it further through retail therapy.

They go to Babies ‘R’ Us in disguise, which is actually Pete not straightening his hair so that it stays unrecognisably frizzy, and Patrick wearing a hoodie suggestive of far more exercise than he has ever been willing to do, and, most tragically, shaving off his side-burns.

The cart they were pushing was obscenely large, with the pregnancy book open to a list of items new parents ought to buy sitting where a shopping list should be.

“Do we want a monitor with a screen?” Pete asks, holding up an obscenely expensive box containing what looks like a clip-on television.

“No,” Patrick says, trying to move the crib and the newborn car seat to fit the baby sling in next to the stroller. “These diapers are taking up all the room!”

“Do we really need 124?”

Patrick doesn’t dignify this with a response. Everything they’ve bought is in white and yellow, except the stroller, which is green and black, and the high chair which is red and white. The sling is black and orange, with a youngish looking guy on its packaging who has obviously had too much sleep to have a baby in real life.

“I guess you don’t need a breast pump,” Pete says as they pass them, looking down the list.

“No I do not – and keep your voice down!” Patrick hisses. “Do we need a baby bath tub or can we just put it in the sink?”

By the time they’re finished shopping, the total is half as high as Patrick’s medical bills, and that’s _with_ the baby being washed in the bathroom sink.

 

 

The retail therapy works its temporary wonders right up until Patrick dumps the last of the stuff in his hallway and finally has a free hand to check his messages.

There are two; one from Mark and one from his mom.

Mark’s text just says, _How’re you doing?_ Patrick ignores it.

The one from his mom is considerably longer, but it all boils down to a single line. _I just don’t understand why you’re doing this._

 _She should already know!_ Patrick feels a surge of anger which goes away as soon as he realises that _he_ doesn’t actually have the answer.

He leaves the things against the wall in the hallway and takes himself off to bed, where he squeezes his eyes shut as though they can block out the fresh waves of doubt rolling through him.

“What’s up?” Pete asks from the doorway. “D’you need a chill pill?”

“No,” Patrick tells him, thinking that maybe the answer is yes.

Pete hovers in silence for a few minutes, and Patrick keeps his eyes closed so that he doesn’t have to acknowledge the discomfort in the room.

“Are you sure about that?”

“I’m not sure about anything,” Patrick replies miserably, rolling stiffly onto his back to stare at the ceiling. “Why the hell am I even doing this?”

“Because you didn’t want to get rid of it?” Pete suggests, coming closer. He kneels on the bed and the springs creak.

“But do I want a baby? Or did I just want to be allowed to want one?” It can’t possibly be fair, can it, to have a baby just on principle?

Pete doesn’t say anything. Patrick supposes it’s too late to be thinking about this anyway. It’s a done deal. Unless Patrick gets struck by lightning, he’ll be a parent in a few months’ time, and nobody can stop him – not even Patrick.

“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” Patrick concludes after a few minutes of silence.

“I want a baby,” Pete murmurs absently.

Patrick lets their arms press against each other, elbow to shoulder. At least one of them knows what he wants.

As he drifts off to sleep he can hear a tune in his head.

 _Best friends,_  
Ex-friends till the end,  
Better off as lovers,  
And not the other way around…

He should move away from Pete, stop letting himself revel in the contact. But Pete's skin is so warm, and for once in his life, Patrick is asleep before he can twitch a muscle.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Annual update just to fuck with u (just kidding).
> 
> Just a warning this one isn't proof read yet so will probably be altered a bit in the future.

They don’t talk about Pete’s lyrics. In fact, Patrick barely thinks about them; all his attention has been swallowed by other worries despite heavy medication to the contrary. They don’t work much on the album, they don’t even see each other together as a full band for more than a fortnight, the longest time in several years, even though Pete and Patrick are living together.

In the few moments Patrick does dedicating to thinking about them, he wonders if Pete knows he’d read those lyrics, if they were really about the two of them, or if he’s just desperately reading into it. Why does he even want to? He’d hardly been hankering after Pete, had even turned him down on the drunken nights post-show in the early days where maybe sex was an option. Sure, Pete’s similarity to Mark hadn’t passed him by, but Patrick is pretty sure he hasn’t been harbouring some secret yearning. In fact, he’s not even sure he finds Pete especially attractive right now, not physically. But people fall in love with people they didn’t think they were attracted to all the time… Maybe that’s what Pete had meant in his lyrics.

He clamps down on the thought, because he can’t _ask_ and there’s no real way to find out. In fact, when he looks at it logically, there’s really no reason for Pete to like him at all. He’s fat, was getting fat even before the pregnancy, he has a bald spot at twenty-two, he’s been showering every third day at best and he’s a pregnant transsexual _dude_ , he’s not even Pete’s gender, let alone his type.

And he especially tries not to think about it, because Pete is the one silver lining he can guarantee himself to find out of the whole situation. He knows he ought to be thinking of the baby, how Pete wanting it and loving it will be great for the child. But he isn’t. The back of his mind is almost grateful for the pregnancy, because a child will tie Pete to him _permanently_.

Patrick shuts down the thought almost before he’s had it. It’s disgusting, manipulative. But Pete has been so much nicer since Patrick got pregnant, been there in almost every way Patrick had needed him to. He could hardly say it hadn’t been _nice_. How could he think that and still feel like he deserves Pete, that Pete doesn’t deserve better, someone who wants their own baby?

Over the next two weeks, the panic starts to leave Patrick, but the guilt still eats at him, coiling and writhing in his belly so violently he sometimes mistakes it for a kick.

The pregnancy book tells him he ought to be talking to the baby, letting it get used to his voice, but without conscious effort he never remembers, and most of the things he does say are apologies when Pete is out of the room.

Patrick feels exhausted, all the time, but maybe that’s just normal when you’re seven and a half months pregnant. He’s lying in bed, too miserable to crawl out of it, when the doorbell rings. He leaves it for Pete, but after a minute, it rings again.

Despite the nagging worry that it could be urgent, he drags himself to the hallway at a snail’s pace and opens the door to find his mom almost disappearing out of sight.

She hears him and turns, and she looks tired and old to him now.

“Patrick,” She says, rushing back towards the door. “Please don’t lock me out, I’ve just come to speak to you!”

He hadn’t been going to, he doesn’t have the energy to slam the door in her face, even if her instincts had been correct.

“Patrick, you look awful!” She gasps, pushing him back from the door to close it behind her, sealing them both inside.

“Hi,” Patrick says. It feels like an underwhelming thing to say, like he should’ve found something more important. A small part of him wants her to be like his mom used to be, to hold him as he cries, but Pete has filled enough of that place in him that it’s masked by his anger, so visceral that it verges on disgust. In the end he just stands there and sways.

“Oh honey, let’s get you sitting down,” She hurries him through to the living room and ushers him onto the couch. “Has something happened?”

“No,” Patrick tells her stiffly.

“Are you sick?” Patricia asks, checking the temperature of his forehead with the back of her hand. “Have you been keeping that cut properly dressed?”

“Yes,” He snaps, not looking at her. “I’m just tired.”

They sit in a silence that tells him she doesn’t believe him. Her refusal to respond to his irritation with anger is infuriating, but he doesn’t want to let her know her opinions carry any weight, so he bites it back.

She sighs. “I just… I don’t understand why you’re putting yourself through all this, Patrick. You’ve been so ill, and so depressed.”

“Who told you I’d be in?”

“I spoke to Pete earlier. He said you haven’t been out for days.”

Patrick feels a pang of betrayal. If Pete had known his mother was coming, why hadn’t he stayed to support him, or at least given Patrick a warning? The paternalism of it just pisses him off.

“I promised I wouldn’t try to persuade you to do anything,” Patricia adds, as though she can hear him thinking.

“Then why are you even here?” Patrick wants badly to trust her, but he doesn’t. In fact, unless she comes back grovelling to be a grandparent, he doesn’t know if he can forgive her at all.

“Just to check up on you, that’s all,” His mom assures him, but for some reason Patrick knows that isn’t all, and after a moment she carries on. “And… And I got a phone call yesterday, from Mark.”

“From Mark?” Patrick sits up, frightened and angry. “And you spoke to him?”

“He said you’d been screening his calls –“

“Yeah, because he’s a total jerk!” Patrick feels his heart pounding again, and he doesn’t know where his medication is. Perhaps it’s by the bed. Pete would know if he were here.

“He told me he was the father. He told me he just wants to know what’s going on with his baby –“

“ _His_ baby?!” Patrick yells, but she doesn’t recoil from him. “He hasn’t even been to my apartment since I found out I was pregnant! He only spoke to me to tell me to get rid of it and that _people like me_ aren’t suitable to be around children!”

“I know, but you didn’t get rid of it and he is still the father! Once it’s born he has rights, he’ll have rights, and-“

“So what? If he doesn’t want to see it, I won’t make him!”

“And what if he does? What if he fights you in court for custody? I know you’ll make a great parent, Patrick, when you’re ready, but don’t think for a second that a judge is going to side with a transgender boy who was just hospitalised because he tried to cut the baby out himself. You can’t just _assume_ everything is going to be okay!”

“I haven’t assumed!” Patrick’s voice breaks pathetically into a high pitched whine, and he knows he’s about to cry. “I just- you have no _idea_ how worried I’ve been. You have no _idea_ how much I’ve spent my time worrying that my kid will be judged, or that somebody will come and take it away. You have _no idea_ how scared I am that the media will find out, and we’ll never be able to escape it. I know I’m a freak, I know I fucked up, but it’s too late, and I’m keeping it!”

Patricia doesn’t reach out to touch him as he breaks down, but she doesn’t say anything either. The tears sting his cheeks, and he itches them away.

“Why am I not allowed to want it? Don’t tell me if I was a twenty-two year old _woman_ who’d gotten pregnant and decided to keep it, my doctor would have _assumed_ I was getting rid of it, and my mom would’ve started looking up adoptive parents! Don’t tell me everyone would be lining up to drive her to the abortion clinic!”

“Patrick,“ She begins, but he cuts her off.

“No! I have a job, don’t I? I have an income, I have a third record deal, I have a band! Pete will help me raise it, you raised three kids on your own, why the hell can’t I bring up one?!” Patrick isn’t crying now, but he is quaking with fury and frustration.

“No one’s saying –“

“Everyone! Everyone is saying! Why can’t you just support me?” He slumps back on the couch, wanting the argument to end.

“Patrick, why do you think I’m here?” His mother shouts over him.

“I don’t know, got a back-street abortion clinic in mind?”

“Patrick don’t be so facetious!” She snaps, thumping the arm of the couch with a fist. “I’m here to make sure you’ve thought everything through, INCLUDING things like whether or not you’ll actually get custody of your own baby!”

Patrick grinds his teeth and says nothing.

“If you don’t talk to Mark and get some kind of agreement before it’s born, you might end up in court and it won’t end well for you.”

“I need a glass of water.” Patrick gets shakily to his feet and pushes Patricia aside before lurching toward the kitchen. His hand trembles as he tries to uncap the bottle of diazepam to shake out the last pill, and swallows it with a cleanish-looking eggcup of water from the tap.

He doesn’t turn around, willing the medication to act faster than ever before, but thirty seconds later and he’s still gripping the kitchen sink as though it needs holding down.

“Just call him, talk about-“

“Stop mom!” He begs, surprised as the words burst out of his mouth. “ _Please_ , just stop, I can’t listen to any more of it, I just can’t-“

“You mustn’t leave this Patrick, just call – “

“I can’t call him!” Patrick spits at the splashback. “I can’t do even one more thing! Everything is already too much. I can’t go out, I can hardly sing, I spend all my time worrying-“

He swallows the rest of the sentence back down, choking and panting and trying to keep any more tears from falling down his scrunched up face.

He can almost hear the comments his mom isn’t making. The _I-told-you-sos_ , the _this-is-what-I-was-worried-about_ , the _I-knew-you-weren’t-ready_. He wills her to say it, to shout at him so he can have it out with her and be done with it, but she doesn’t say anything.

“I can’t call him,” he repeats, his voice hoarse, just to attempt to whip her up into an argument again. It doesn’t sound challenging in the slightest though, just pathetic. He doesn’t want her pity, that would be even worse.

“Oh sweetie,” she sighs, and it _is_ worse. “Maybe I can-“

“Stop pretending you’re involved, Mom!” He cuts her off again. It’s nasty and spiteful, and he knows before he even says it that the guilt will be crushing. “You haven’t done anything to support me at all! You never visited, you never speak to me except to say you think I’m making a mistake, I didn’t get any support from you about what it was like to be pregnant, or what kind of things I’d need for when the baby arrives! How am I meant to take on even more stuff and get better at the same time when all I’m being told is I’m some kind of hideous fuck-up who’s doing something terrible? Either help me or don’t, but don’t pretend you’ve been so fucking supportive when all you’ve done is make me feel terrible for _wanting my own baby_.”

Part of him expects to turn around to see her stunned face, streaked with tears, before storming out, but she has weathered his vitriol and instead it’s him blubbering like a child. “Mom, Mommy,” he whimpers, burying his face against her shoulder. “Mom, what do I do? How do I do this?”

She holds him as though he’s been having a preteen tantrum and not an adult argument. “I’ll talk to Mark, I’ll tell him you’re not doing too well – “

“No, if he knows I’m a mess he’ll have more to tell his lawyers!” He almost shouts into her chest.

“Okay, well I’ll tell him you’re too busy preparing for the baby and he can talk details out with me,” she says.

“I don’t want him involved.” His voice is muffled by her, the smell of her thick in the snotty breaths he forces in through his nose.

“Patrick,” she sighs, “I know you don’t want to hear his, but you need to make concessions. If you don’t, he might take you to court and that could turn out much worse.”

She’s right of course. Rationally he knows she’s right. In his head and his chest, he wants to scream that Mark is nothing to do with this baby, that he has no right to be involved. But there’s no point, so he stays quiet.

“Have you packed your maternity bag yet?” Patricia asks.

He pulls back from her. “Not yet,” he says, pretending he knows what a maternity bag is.

“Would you like to do it together?” She asks, as though he’s a child and she’s asking whether he wants her to read him a story or take him to the zoo.

He shrugs. Catharsis had sapped the anger from his bones, but also left him back in his apathetic state, with no energy at all, and the peace he’s found is too fragile for him to even dare say no.

She takes this for assent. “Do you have a spare backpack?”

Before he can answer, she’s already on her way to his bedroom – his and Pete’s.

She blinks as she opens the door and sees Pete’s belongings intermingling with the piles of Patrick’s stuff. “I… Thought Peter was staying in the spare bedroom?”

He shrugs again. He could answer her, tell her that there was no spare room and that it was a matter of convenience, but the spiteful part of him is still there and it wants her to get the wrong idea, to know she’s missing large parts of his life and has fallen out of his pitifully small circle of trust.

In the end, he just holds his tongue and follows his mom through to his bedroom where she’s holding up a black and purple striped rucksack.

“This one’s a good size,” She says.

“Okay. It’s Pete’s,” Patrick tells her, with maybe a tiny bit of satisfaction that she now thinks they really are together, no matter how far from reality that might be. “But I’m sure he won’t mind.”

“Oh, uh, we can use another one,” Patricia says, flustered. “I’m sure you had a tan one that was probably big enough.”

“This one’s fine,” he insists, feeling that same small thrill he did before. “Like you said, it’s the right size.”

He takes it from her slackening fingers and opens it, dumping Pete’s bottom-of-bag crap out onto the bed. There’s a napkin covered with lyrics in it, which he pockets before Patricia’s curiosity can overtake her.

Packing the bag is deeply satisfying. Patrick likes planning things, even if he always forgets to do it, and if he just closes his eyes and ignores his mother’s voice, he can pretend he’s just packing a bunch of clothes for some out-of-state show on a weekend back when he was finishing high school.

After his mom has said enough for him to gleam that a maternity bag is what he’ll be taking to hospital for the birth, he stops listening to her and just shoves things in he thinks he might need.

A spare t-shirt and pants, underwear and a tiny onesie Pete had bought, and a blanket for the baby, and a bottle with the tiniest nipple in the set, and two cartons of ready-made infant formula. Then he packs an MP3 player, and, feeling very uncomfortable, shoves a pocket-guide to birth and newborns to the bottom of the bag when his mom isn’t looking. Finally, he stuffs the crumpled napkin into a side pocket alongside his toothbrush.

“And what about diapers?” His mom asks. “Patrick, are you even listening to me? Am I alone here?”

“Can we finish this another time? I’m really tired.”

“Of course honey. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

After she’s hugged him and seen herself out, Patrick lies defeated on his bed, unable to find a position where his belly doesn't feel oppressively heavy. He barely has the energy to move a muscle, even though he was probably only awake for an hour or two. In spite of the weird little thrill that implying Pete was his partner to his mother's anxious face, when Pete comes back, he makes no move to suggest he’d gotten up at all, or that his mom had been there. He's too tired to know whether this is due to some sense of betrayal or if he's just too tired to speak.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a request someone sent me (ages ago), and as I hadn't posted in so long, I felt like the least I could do was include it. 
> 
> See the end for CONTENT WARNINGS

Patrick wakes an hour or two before dawn, covered in sweat. A twinge in his abdomen has his pulse racing, but after a few seconds, he realises it’s just his bladder, overfilled and aching like he’s been kicked in the belly. Indeed, he has been.

Pete is curled on his side with his back to Patrick, as he has the last few nights.

It’s cold outside. Condensation runs down the window, soaking the pullover Patrick’s mom had tried to swap for Pete’s in his maternity bag a few days before. Patrick makes it to the bathroom and back without waking him, but Pete stirs as he gets back into bed.

“Mmmh,” Pete mumbles unintelligibly as Patrick tries to get comfortable lying on his side, something which is becoming increasingly difficult. “Nyou’re cold,” He slurs, rolling clumsily in the bed to pull Patrick against him.

Despite the toll events have taken, Patrick still isn’t the kind to fall asleep as his head hits the pillow. He closes his eyes and shuffles further down the pillow, trying to find a bearable position.

Something brushes against his butt.

He wiggles more, bracing himself with one bent knee to stop himself from keeling over onto his belly, and as he does it, the something twitches against his ass again.

Patrick freezes for what feels like an eternity.

Obviously guys get erections at night. It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen Joe’s pants tented at four AM in some hotel room when he should have been asleep. He even got them himself, before he’d gotten himself knocked up.

But this particular erection is pressed against his ass crack, through his shorts. It twitches again, and this time it definitely isn’t his movement.

Pete is asleep, he tells himself, wondering if he should move away or wake him up, or if the least awkward option is simply to try and sleep through it; it will go away in a bit, anyway.

The head of Pete’s cock is pressing into his ass, right between his cheeks.

Patrick can feel his pulse racing again, but this time it’s lower down. He shifts his weight, hoping Pete’s cock will come away from him, but it just brushes up and down the length of his ass.

Patrick closes his eyes. It’s late and he needs to sleep.

His mind races with a thousand illicit thoughts of what could happen now. Momentarily he entertains the fantasy that Pete is not as asleep as he seems, and that Patrick will roll over, and Pete will be gazing at him with hunger burning in his eyes. Then he’ll get as close as he can, and let his wetness press back against Pete’s cock. They’ll rut against each other, and Pete will pull his shorts aside and slip his cock inside of him, fuck him gently but not slowly, fingering Patrick’s swollen clit with urgent, quick movements. In this fantasy, Patrick isn’t pregnant – he’s skinny, beautiful, masculine, all at the same time, and Pete wants him.

He’s soaking wet. Before he can stop himself, he’s grabbing at his own clit, tugging, stroking it. He cums quickly, but is instantly ready and needing to go again, squeezing his clit hard whilst he spasms but not pausing from the strokes once they end. He fights to keep from rolling his hips in time to the strokes; he can’t risk waking Pete, but the little movements he can’t stop from making cause Pete’s dick to bump up against him harder this time.

Hating himself for this unforgivable betrayal of Pete’s trust, Patrick teases his slick hole with one finger and then two, grinding his palm against his clit as he fucks them in and out as shallowly as possible, vaguely aware that he was warned against any kind of intercourse, but too desperately horny to care.

He can feel his orgasm just on the horizon when Pete moves behind him, more than just his cock, and wraps his arm over Patrick’s belly.

For a moment, Patrick almost expects him to reach between his legs to stroke him there, but Pete’s arm is a dead weight, his wrist against Patrick’s pubic bone and less than an inch from Patrick’s sticky fingers.

He stills them, fear temporarily overriding the lust coursing through his body. He can’t ask if Pete is awake, so instead he listens for his breathing, trying to decide whether it’s too fast, too deliberate, anything that could indicate that Pete is aware of what’s happening.

After several minutes, he tries to finger himself again, but the moment he does so, the movement jiggles Pete’s arm, causing him to stir.

Impossibly, Pete’s cock gets closer, nestled between Patrick’s ass cheeks with the head pressed against the hole through the thin cotton.

He can’t risk Pete waking up and realising what he’s done – he can already feel the self-loathing bubbling up within him. Is this assault? It probably is; Pete has helped him, taken care of him, watched over him, and Patrick is betraying his trust in the night like some common rapist.

He takes his hands away from himself and wipes his fingers on the sheets.

Between his own disgust and his swollen, throbbing cunt, it takes him well past day break to fall asleep.

 

When he wakes the next morning, Pete is lying on his back on his side of the bed, and Patrick’s shorts are covered with his own, slowly drying bodily fluids. The duvet is bunched at the foot of the bed.

"Did you have fun by yourself last night?" Pete says with a laugh that becomes more forced in Patrick's mind as he processes it.

"What?" Patrick feels the blood draining from his face as memories of a few hours before resurface.

Pete snorts at him. "Your pants are a mess. I get it, no privacy anymore, but damn!"

Patrick shuts his legs immediately, drawing them up as high as he can. 

Pete's teasing eases off as he see's Patrick's face, but that just make's Patrick feel worse.  _He's trying to be considerate of me, when I should be begging him for forgiveness._

“Want to go out for breakfast?” Pete reaches over and ruffles his hair, the sort of thing he'd have done if he'd overdone a joke at Patrick's expense.

Patrick has never hated himself more than he does right at this moment. His face burns with shame that he can only hope Pete won't pick up on, and he blinks a burning sensation from his eyes. “Sure. I need to shower first."

Pete snorts at him again and leaves him alone in his room, which reeks of sex and sweat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings:  
> Masturbation in bed with an unconscious and unknowing person.  
> Self loathing.


End file.
